March 2 2006 • 10:44 AM
By:
Michael Murphy
Episode 13: Nested Style Sheets, Part 3 (VIDEO)
At last, the thrilling conclusion of the Style Sheets Trilogy. The final installment on this topic demonstrates some additional flexibility you can build into your style sheets to account for the unexpected by using samples of nested styles I’ve created. Also, for good measure, you’ll find out what a right-align tab is, and learn how to refer to it (and other special characters InDesign recognizes) in your nested style settings.
What’s with the book and synchronize styles? I do not do
a lot book design. Now half way a job i encountered a problem. One of
my nested styles needed a little change. Trough 1 char needed to be
trough 1 word.?r?n?r?nI made the change and clicked on synchronize.
The change I just made in the paragraph’s nested style was taken
back to ‘trough 1 char’?r?n?r?nAlso tried to synchronize when
applied the change to the first document I had made. with the same
result.?r?n?r?nI thought the synchronize function would change all
style in documents within a book to the style last change. So what is
the synchronize to be used for, or was it not fully implemented in CS
([i]indeed CS without the two [/i])
Ed — There could be a couple of
things at work here, but assuming it’s an error with how your book
is set up, let’s start with the obvious possibilities:?r?n?r?n1)
Make sure that after you modify one style in one document, that you
save that document before synchronizing the book.?r?n?r?n2) You can
only synchronize from one file in your book. So you need to make sure
that the document you changed the style in is set to be the Style
Source for your book. If it isn’t, synchronization will not reflect
your changes. In fact, it will revert the style you just changed to
whatever the Style Source document is using.?r?n?r?nBased on what you
said happened, this is probably the source of your problem. If it’s
not, let me know and I’ll try to find another possible cause for
you.
Humm. I feel kinda silly right now. I selected the file
(highlighted that is, not clicking in that box just beside filename)I
wanted to use as a source and assumed ’synchronize’ would apply
it’s style to all others. ?r?n?r?nAnd of-course that doesn’t make
sense in the majority of cases…
episode 13 question: To turn off a nested style we can put in a list of characters and InDesign will pick the first one of that list to use as it’s trigger to turn the nested style off. But for the bulleted lists you have “n^t” which you said stands for an “n” followed by a tab. Why in this case do the two item signify a string and not a list of two different characters?
Excellent question, Jason! The reason for the difference is the caret character (^). When your paragraph’s nested style instruction encounters that character, it essentially changes the context of everything else around it.
In other words, when it sees the “n^t”, it makes that context absolute. It must be the letter “n” followed by a tab, because the caret is regarded as a special character by the application.
When it sees the string of possible options (.!?–—:), it does not see any of them as a special instruction, so its default behavior is to just wait for the first one it encounters and move on to the next portion of the nested style instruction.
If I were to try to put in a tab character along with those variables (and believe me, I’ve tried), it would break the style. Even if I type in a question mark, Em dash or other “qualifying” character, it won’t execute the instruction, because the ^t is telling InDesign that it has to find all of those characters in that exact sequence followed by a tab, just as the n^t indicated that it had to find the letter “n” followed by a tab.
It’s a weird concept to express in written form, so I hope I’ve explained that properly.
What an odd designation for InDesign to make, so if I wanted a nested character style to stop at either a tab, an em space, or an en space, how would I do that? By listing ^t^m^> would it accept that as a list, or as a tab, followed by an em space, followed by an en space? (thanks for the quick reply, BTW)
I’ve tested this out a few ways, Jason, and it appears that, when a special “metacharacter” (InDesign’s fancy word for those Caret-based special characters) is used as the nested style criteria, it can only be combined with one other “actual” character. For example, the letter “n” followed by the tab character reference, OR the tab (or other special) character followed by another normal character. No other combinations have worked in my tests.
Well here’s hoping for CS3 then. That can be added to my list of things to wish for. Thanks for the clarification.
Jason (and everyone else reading this):
Please disregard the entire 7th post (“I’ve tested this out…”). It seems that my testing methods were essentially built to give me the results I expected, but it does not actually work the way I described above.
As far as nested styles go, it does not appear that you can combine any metacharacters with regular text or other metacharacters. If your nested style “triggers” need to use metacharacters (tabs, etc.), they are stand-alone criteria.
Sorry for the unintentional misinformation.