Tip of the Week: Use a Fake Word Space for a Nested Style
This InDesign tip on using a fake word space for a nested style was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on March 2, 2017.
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If you’re trying to add a nested style to a paragraph style, but you don’t have an obvious stopping point where the nested character style should stop being applied, like an em dash or colon, try a fake word space!
For example, you can replace a word space with a couple thin spaces (which, together, are about the same width), and choose “thin space” as the stopping point in the Nested Style setup.
Then in the document, the Bold character style gets applied to the text automatically, up to the first thin space it encounters, whenever the paragraph style is applied.
You can experiment with different space characters to see what’s the closest equivalent to a single space in the font you’re using in the text. It takes a little work to replace the spaces with your stop-character equivalents, but it only needs to be done once.
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Thanks for the tip!
Depending on what you’re going to do with the data using multiple thin spaces can lead to unintended results: copying that text into applications that don’t support thin spaces might convert them into multiple ‘normal’ spaces. Some preflight tools report multiple spaces as an error.
So in those cases (or actually in all cases) I would recommend using the ’end nested style‘ character which seems semantically correct. In my experience other applications usually just ignore it when copying text from InDesign or the resulting PDF.
Best
Bill M. Islington
You can also ask to the one who have to type the text to add a special caracter combination you can search then replace by a “stop nested style here” caracter. I usually ask for “xxx” (well, except, if I have to design something related to pornography ;-) )
Bom dia
End nested style character? Thsa is why it is there for. What am I missing that this would work different/better than a End Nested Style character?
A space preceded/followed by an End Nested Style Character would also work, of course. One of my clients found this method to be better for their workflow and I thought it was clever.
I’m just wondering how the client finds it better for the workflow. A keyboard shortcut for End Nested Style is so much easier.
Are they having it keyboarded/typed and import a tagged text file?
I use xTags and when need an End Nested Style character keyed, I use the .
Yeah–I know it looks weird. But with xTags I can use Quark coding and it converts to InDesign coding.
One possible drawback of applying a nested style and using a different space character to determine that “breaking point” is when working with justified text. As the composition of text tries to adjust the line spacing and varies the width of all regular spaces in that first line, any other space characters might noticably stand out as being of a different width.
I get the same obtrusive difference when I try to create a drop cap for a whole word and then set the point size of that first word to a quarter of its size (thereby creating a “window” underneath the first word).