Beware of local formatting and numbered lists
OK, this is pretty obscure. But perhaps it will be helpful for someone.
You may be aware of the long-standing issue in InDesign where the numeral at the start of auto-numbered paragraphs picks up the formatting of the first character of the paragraph. Anne-Marie wrote a nice post about this here.
But there’s more to this story. Create a couple of paragraphs, format them with a typeface that has only a regular and bold weight, such as Times. Make sure that no paragraph style is applied, not even the [Basic Paragraph] style. Then create two character styles, named Bold and Italic, that include just the Bold and Italic attributes, and no other formatting.
Now, apply bold or italic local formatting to the first word of your paragraphs, and you’ll see that the number becomes bold or italic also. Undo this, and apply your bold or italic character styles to the first words of the paragraphs, and you’ll see that the numeral doesn’t take on the bold or italic formatting. In the example below, paragraphs 1 and 3 have local formatting, and 2 and 4 are formatted with character styles.
So, it seems that a good workaround would be to always use character styles if you need to apply formatting to the first characters of a numbered paragraph. But, alas, it isn’t so simple.
Create another example paragraph, and format this one with a typeface that has extended weights and styles, such as Myriad Pro Light or Helvetica LT Std Light. When you apply bold or italic direct formatting to the first word in this example, the same thing will happen…the numeral will pick up this local formatting. But here is where it gets weird. Apply the bold or italic character style that you’ve created to the first word. Notice anything odd? In the case of Helvetica LT Std Light, applying the bold character style to the first word makes the numeral heavier, but not bold turning it into Helvetica LT Std Roman. Even more unexpected, applying the italic character style also turns the numeral into Helvetica LT Std Roman. I’d expect that other typeface combinations would also give some unexpected results. In the example below, paragraphs 1 and 3 contain local formatting in the first words, and 2 and 4 are formatted with character styles.
Granted, this is very obscure. But it happened to a client of mine, causing them to scratch their collective heads. So it could happen to you.
The moral of the story? Always use paragraph AND character styles. In this case, if paragraph styles are used for the text, and the first word exceptions are formatted with character styles, everything works as expected!
For a couple of other workarounds, see Anne Marie’s post.
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Wow, that is obscure, but great that you teased out the solution! One thing I want to clarify, though: When you say “always used paragraph AND character styles” you don’t really mean use character styles throughout the whole paragraph… just the first word (in this case). There are too many people who seem to always want to apply a paragraph style to a paragraph, then select the whole paragraph and apply a character style on top of the paragraph style — so they get both! It’s crazy. Don’t do that. ;)
Yes, Amen David! Character styles should be used for EXCEPTIONS to paragraph styles; for characters that need to appear different than the surrounding paragraph. What I always tell people in training classes: A typical document normally shouldn’t have more than a handful of character styles.
May i had i had the not so nice surprise to see that it also takes kerning from the next letters ? (and that sucks as soon as you’re above 9 (or 99)…
I have a question regarding indesign data merge. I have a brochure which a part of the text is variable data. I am creating different layers for the text variable data. How do i identify the field as a layer in the data source file. Like if it is an image i would use the @ symbol before the field name. what about for layer what is the correct symbol that identifies that field as a layer? Can you help please!
thanks
Deb
@deborah: I don’t think that is possible. As this blog post has nothing to do with data merge, you might consider asking at https://creativepro.com/forum
I’ve seen this problem before and have a simple solution. Apply a character style to the numeric “bullet.” It will then resist the formatting applied to the text in that list. The character style can be applied automatically in the bullets and numbering options of the paragraph style. Problem solved.
P.S. This problem also affects bulleted lists and the same solution works.
What a detailed esxplanation! Yes, there are many factors and the answer is to use paragraph and character styles everywhere.
I always create and apply a character style for the number or bullet as Dan Rodney says. It nails down any unconsistency onto the numbered text.
I wonder if you could use a nested style to avoid this issue?
Nester: No, nested styles ignore bullets/numbers — correctly, for a change.
@Nester: Yes, nested character styles could be used to bold the first word in my example, but not to format the numeral numeral.
The upshot of all this is to use these best practices when working with an autonumbered list:
1. Always format the text in the numbered paragraph with a paragraph style.
2. If you need to format the first character, word, or sentence different than the rest of the paragraph, use as character style (or a nested style) to do this.
3. You can always apply a character style directly to the numeral in the Bullets and Numbering dialog box to format it exactly as you’d like.
Sweet! thanks to google search! as I was wondering how not to bold the first bullet.
It’s so irritating when this happens!
Very interesting discussion here — I’m so glad to have stumbled onto it! I was searching for thoughts on exactly this problem with bulleted lists (in InDesign CS5.5). In my case, I was using a paragraph style for the bulleted list — “Red Bullets” so my bullet color was different from the text.
I also had a body character style, but needed in this one instance to bold and italicize two bulleted paragraphs. The paragraphs were each quotations we were highlighting in a fact sheet, and at the end of each paragraph I listed a name of the quotee, to which I added additional formatting (I had a different swatch color and also applied a stroke outline around the text, which was necessary due to the color scheme on this fact sheet). Actually, I also applied this same outline formatting to the quotation marks that started the paragraphs.
This caused the bullets to also have stroke … I was baffled, and must not have been using paragraph and character styles in quite the right way. I tried editing the styles, creating new ones and reapplying, and nothing worked.
The workaround I decided to try — which not sure if this is a best practice (I’m not a designer by extensive formal training, though I’ve had some classes) — was to convert those bullets to text, and then I manually highlighted the bullets and removed the stroke.
I’m sure this workaround wouldn’t be recommended for larger documents or swaths of text, but thought I’d just mention in case others were having problems getting other approaches to work.
Just what I needed. Thanks!