Nested Styles and Quote Marks
Khizkey from the New Israelite Reader wrote us:
I’m trying to create a nested paragraph style that will automatically apply a special oversized character style to double quotes in my pull quotes.
The first nested style (on the first quotes) works but the last will not work no matter what I try.
I asked Khizkey to send me a screen shot of his paragraph style’s Nested Styles panel, suspecting a problem with “up to” vs. “through;” but everything appeared fine. His screen shot is too small to reproduce here, but here were the settings:
Apply “Pull Quote – Qt Mk” through 1 Character
Apply [None] up to 1 [he inserted a double quote mark here] Apply “Pull Quote – Qt Mk” through 1 Character
I duplicated his settings on my machine:
The “quote mark” character style is supposed to increase the size of the type and change its typeface to Adobe Caslon. But sure enough, I had the same exact problem as Khizkey:
At first, I thought that perhaps InDesign can’t apply a nested character style to a character that was used as a “stop” character in the line before it. That would have been news to me; but I’m always learning new things about InDesign, so I wouldn’t have been too surprised. :-)
To test my theory, I replaced the quotes in the sample text with exclamation points, and then replaced the double quote in the nested style with an exclamation point as well. I found that InDesign was able to apply the nested styles perfectly, to both the opening and closing exclamation point. Hmmm. That meant there was something wrong with the quote mark.
Then I realized the problem. InDesign was looking for a straight double quote, but the sample text only had proper “curly” quotes. Unfortunately, the fly-out menu in the “stop character field” in the Nested Styles area (the one that lists Sentences, Words, Characters, and so on) doesn’t have any listings for curly quotes. If you know your OS’s special keyboard combination for these — on the Mac, a double closing quote is Shift-Option-[ — then you can insert it properly yourself.
If you can’t remember the keyboard combination, you can use the code that Find/Change (in the Edit menu) uses. It has a far more robust fly-out menu of special characters to the right of its Find What and Change To fields:
After choosing “Double Right Quotation Marks,” the Find field showed this code:
I copied the code, cancelled out of Find/Change, and pasted the code into the nested style field of my paragraph style, replacing the straight double quote. Immediately, InDesign converted the code back to a double close quote:
That fixed the problem with the nested style, and now the pull quote formats just as Khizkey needs it to:
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Wow!
Thanks a ton.
This was giving me fits and causing me to spend too much time try to fix it.
Khizkey
If you can?t remember the keyboard combinations for any unusual characters, simply turn on Apple’s Character Palette in the International preference pane, Input Menu section. To check all available combinations with your keyboard layout, enable the Keyboard Viewer.
Nothing to do with the topic, but has anyone seen this?
Oh, my. I hope Adobe gets back to its sense while there is time.
For this effect, I usually deploy the Zapf Dingbats large double-quotes. I also use nested styles to make sure the characters stay in the correct font.
Note that you don’t have to use codes for special characters in that nested styles box — you can just copy and paste the correct character into it.
I’m a little bit testy about this. It’s not a straight quotation mark at all, it’s an inch mark. I’m sorry, but it gets me up all the time and when I see it in text it annoys me. I may be wrong about the classification of this but for me it’s always been an inch mark.
Personally, I call them straight quote marks because inch marks are slanted slightly…they’re a different glyph.
Oh ok, I stand corrected.
I agree with Eugene?it makes me nuts every time I see a nice ad in a magazine with those “carrot sticks”! They are tres ugly. Give me a curly quote any time!
No no, Anne-Marie is correct, inch marks is a different glyph, often straight quotes are used to depict inch marks, which is now on my list of things that annoy me. Has anyone mentioned the Use Typographers Quotes in the preferences yet? Really if you are quoting they should be “Curly Quotes”. But each to there own, I’ve no right to be a critic :) Thanks for your support Lauren, they are an eyesore in fairness. :D
And that’s the third time today I’ve used there instead of their… oops
All this talk about the quotes is neither here nor there, the solution is perfect and each to their own on their preference. I for one didn’t know you could type any character into the space for the nested style *searches for the embarrased smiley*
Can we all get away from typographer’s quotes and curly quotes. Quotation marks are quotation marks period. The punctuation marks being used incorrectly in so much design nowadays were originally called Prime and Double Prime.
If people are going to use high end typographical products (not freeking desktop publishing crap) then can we please get the vocabulary correct.
Sorry — I had to get that off my chest!
Is is possible to apply a nested paragraph style to selected text only?
OR
To create nested character styles?
Here’s the situation:
I have a 120+ page document with hundreds of instances of various brands, and a list of those brands. The brands need be changed to italics, and next to each brand we need to add a superscripted number.
There must be a way to use find/replace + apply a nested style that would turn everything up to the last character italics, and then superscript the last character!
But how?
Thank you! I’ve been trying to find out a solution for ages!
Something that could’ve kept me confused and hopeless for quite some time, was solved so, so easily by this post. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it Anne-Marie! :)
Has anyone been able to get this to work for French quotation marks? « quote »
Nevermind, solved it! Only had to copy and paste in both the « and » symbols into the Nested Styles dialog box.
By the way, thanks again for this article, it’s been a great time saver!
I copied the nested style exactly and it’s still not working for me. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong. Also, how to do you keep the larger quote marks from changing the spacing on the lower sized text. I’m using the Source Serif Pro font in case that matters. I like the idea of using the Zapf dingbats quotes, but still don’t know how to protect the spacing. Any help is really appreciated. I’m doing pull quotes in a book. Thanks, Jane
BTW, Can we make a recommendation to Adobe to increase the number of options available in Nested Styles? I also can’t stand the straight quotes, even in a Sans Serif font.