Creating type styles - InDesign Tutorial

- [Instructor] One of the first tasks that I complete in book production is setting the text. Now, I don't always have the text at hand before it starts, so I sometimes have to, to use a technical term, wing it. (chuckles) And actually react later on, but I put into something what I think will be in there. There is almost certainly going to be a title page with a title on it, and then there's maybe a subtitle on there as well. And then there'll be some things like the author name, the publisher name, and then there'll be the front matter in a book, and of course, more subheadings, maybe a couple of character style overrides here. But the body copy is the first thing I set, and then everything else comes from that. So here, for example, I've got some bulleted list stuff. I've got contents and index. I've got a small print section there, and I've got overrides for character styles similar to the one on the other page here. This layout is actually the same size as the layout we'll be using in the main project and building in the very next movie. But here I've driven the layout with six columns to help me set the text, like so. And if I just tap W, on my screen you can see that it's nice and light and airy within this layout. You're not always afforded that luxury, but when you are, it does make it so, so different. So each one of these things is actually a style. Let me just go ahead and go and zoom in on one of these pages just here and double click. And if I open the Paragraph Styles panel here, you can see that this one is my title. That's only likely to really occur once or twice. Then I've got the title subheading. Okay, I've got the title author. Okay, and the title publisher. They are all kind of almost single-instance things. Then I've got the body copy itself. Now this one is an override of the body copy. This is body indent because it's indented in on the left and right here. This is also indented. All three of these are, in fact. Then I've got a subheading here. Now, something I also do is I normally put numbers on these because that way I can apply them very, very quickly, like 01, if I'm using Quick Apply. In fact, if I just take this away just for a second, I'll click on there and make that body text like so. I'll use Quick Apply. So hold down CMD on a Mac, Ctrl on Windows, and hit Return. Then I can just type zero, it highlights 01_sub, and there you go. I can apply it like that. Now underneath here, this is also... Or should be body copy just there. I've just noticed it isn't. So I'm going to change it to body copy just there. And then I'm going to go ahead and modify that with a character style. You can see C1 Italics just there. And I realize now that I actually should have made a separate one for that. So maybe I could try, actually, bodyIndent, and see if that works. That works. Here's my body text, which is set at 11 points on a 14-point letting, so it's nice and airy in the space. I've also given that a little bit of tracking. So just 10 on the tracking there, to space that out a little bit. And the kerning is set to optical there. Now I can still override that if it's necessary in certain instances, but that, generally... I love that algorithm. Works really, really well. Let's go on to the next page here. So we've got these bullets here also. Here we go, we've got this block just here. And now this says its basic paragraph. I clearly haven't set that style properly. So if I just go ahead and choose this... In fact I don't even need to do that. I can just click in there and I'll set that to Body, like so. Okay, fine, it actually is using Body, and then there's the character style override for that. Just to note, the important thing with character style overrides is, unless you need to actually change the font. Let's go ahead and have a look at that. Okay. Then leave that blank. In fact, leave as much as you can of that blank. That means you could apply it to pretty much anything. Here it will just apply, provided there's an availability for it, an italic variant. Let me just cancel out of that and click in Acknowledgements and put that override on there. So I need to select the text because of the paragraph. If I do that, suddenly you can see that has also changed there, like so. And I'll put None back on for that. Once you've got the styles, and I'm going to be keeping this in this document, you'll find out why momentarily, actually, if you're watching the movie straight on after this one, but if not, when you get around to doing that. So we'll keep this separate, and then in the next movie we'll actually start building the framework for the pages and bringing these styles into that document.