In previous blog posts we have extolled the benefits of setting up Paragraph Style Sheets to instantly format your text and once you have taken the time to set these up how they can then be loaded to, and applied to other InDesign documents.
However, there may be times when you have lots of text to format. All of which follows a standard and repetitive format, when even the simple task of selecting the paragraph and applying a style to it by the press of a button, can still feel quite laborious.
So in this post I want to demonstrate how you can speed this process up further by delving a little deeper into the Paragraph Style Panel dialogue box, which allows you to choose one style that is subsequently followed by another style, thereby allowing you to format many paragraphs of text simultaneously.
Remember, the best way to learn InDesign is in person from an expert, so if you really want to get to grips with the world’s favourite document tool then come on our 2-day InDesign training course!
Setting up your Paragraph Styles to be continued by another
- With your Paragraph Styles set up, as in the illustration below, select the first style from the Paragraph Style Panel that you wish to apply to your text. In this case it is the “Books name”.
- Go to the Paragraph Style panels fly out menu on the top right hand side of the panel and select Style Options and the Paragraph Style dialogue box will launch.
- From “Books Name” select the Next style in this case it is “Question about Author” and click OK.
- Repeat the process incrementally; every consecutive Paragraph Style will need to have a Next Style applied to it: In this case to the “Question about author text” is followed by “Body Copy No.1”.
- “Body Copy No.1” will have the Next Style set up as “Question about the book”. “Question about the book” will have the Next Style set up as “Body Copy No.2” and so on and so forth.
- Make sure you have saved all these edits and have saved your document.
- Below is unformatted text with paragraphs set up, as the ¶ icons show.
- Now here is the fun part, to format your text with all the different paragraph styles applied, using your type tool select all of the text you wish to format as below.
- Using the CTRL key (Mac) or Right Click (Win), select the first paragraph style in the sequence; in this case the “Books Name” and from the contextual menu select Apply “Books Name” then next style.
- All of the selected paragraphs will have the consecutive styles applied.
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