Adobe® InDesign® CS4 Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts

Chapter 2. Nesting and Sequencing Styles

THE CONCEPT OF separate paragraph and character styles was around long before InDesign in applications like PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and Microsoft Word. QuarkXPress had a close-but-no-cigar implementation of character styles when they were added to that application. They were, undeniably, a great way to save attributes for text that varied from a paragraph’s overall formatting and to make fast changes in a document by modifying a style instead of tracking down what could amount to hundreds of local overrides. But that’s as far as it went. The two styles—paragraph and character—were completely independent of one another. In other applications, character styles still had to be applied one by one to any text ...