Training Courses on Adobe InDesign Must Cover Styles
We believe that all InDesign training courses should incorporate the correct use of styles to enhance workflow and maintain consistency within a document and across a range of documents. Most delegates on our InDesign training courses know what styles are: a series of named formats which can be applied to your text so you don’t have to manually apply formatting attributes one by one. Even new InDesign users are probably familiar with the use of styles in Microsoft Word: “Heading 1″, “Heading2″, “Normal”, etc. However, InDesign’s implementation of styles is much more sophisticated and, when we run InDesign training courses in London, we always emphasise their importance.
The key benefits of using styles are, firstly, maintaining consistency: the same formats are applied every time without accidental variation. Secondly, speed: if a heading needs six text attributes applied then, if you are not using styles, you will have to apply each of these attributes manually. If you have styles in place, you can apply the necessary formats with a single click or a keystroke. A third benefit is that you can update and modify the look of your text simply by redefining your style(s).
One less obvious benefit of using styles in InDesign is what we might call scalability. Styles play a key role in some of the program’s advanced features and documents that do not use styles cannot benefit from these features. For example, a key part of creating XML-based layouts, is the mapping of XML tags to styles within a document.
A second example is encountered when creating tables of contents. InDesign generates tables of contents based on the use of styles. In setting up the table of contents, one specifies which styles are to be tracked. When the table of contents is actually created, InDesign finds each bit of text in the defined style or styles and, if required, places the appropriate page number next to it.
In reality, the table of contents feature is more multi-purpose than the name suggests since it can be used to produce a listing of any elements within a document provided a particular style has been used consistently. For example, if all images in a document have a caption formatted with a particular style, the table of contents facility can be used to generate a list of images.
A third example of the advanced use of styles is when working with books; a feature which enables multiple InDesign documents to be treated as one entity for such operations as preflighting, printing and the production of tables of contents. Different users can work on each document within the book and the styles used within all documents can be streamlined by a process called synchronisation.
Because of its importance, we include styles both on our beginners InDesign training courses and on or advanced InDesign training. On our advanced training courses, we explain the use of facilities like nested styles whereby a character style can be embedded within a paragraph style and automatically applied to a given set of characters or words within the paragraph; for example, it might be to all characters up to the first occurrence of an em dash or a colon.
