Live from Washington, D.C.: It’s The InDesigner!
Last night, I delivered an expanded, 90-minute version of my “Styles Equal Substance” presentation to a record-setting audience of more than 250 people at the Washington, D.C. InDesign User Group meeting. It was an amazing experience. The crowd was energetic, had great questions and made a first-time visitor to the nation’s capitol feel right at home.
“Styles Equal Substance” has been so well-received in both Boston and D.C., that I’ll be presenting an hour-long version of it at the upcoming InDesign Conference in Miami (February 26 – March 1, 2008). If you can’t make it to Miami, you can get a glimpse at the extent of styles throughout the application by downloading the handout from the D.C. meeting.
Photo by Mitchell Osborne, courtesy of the InDesign User Group web site. See more photos from the meeting.
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June 30th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Thanks a lot for your invaluable podcast which has made learning indesign for a total newbie to the software like me a lot easier, the truth is your podcast does just what it promises to, provides insight, instruction and information into Indesign CS4. Having said that, i would like to know how i can incorporate white spaces into my paragraph and/or character styles because there doesn’t seem to be any provision for those and also, paragraph styles with drop caps and nested styles don’t quite seem to be appear the way i expect them to especially when i want drop caps of a different character. Maybe obviously simple questions but like i said, I’m totally green @ Indesign
June 30th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Kiki —
You’re very welcome…and thanks for your kind feedback.
Both of your problems are easily solved — and covered in great detail in my book, if you’ll indulge that small sales pitch. 🙂
But here’s a quick, free answer to both questions:
1) Nearly every InDesign character has a “metacharacter” equivalent: a way of describing it in places like the Nested Styles dialog, Find/Change dialog, etc. To find out what the metacharacter for a custom white space is, just type “metacharacter” into the InDesign Help search and the first matching “article” that comes up will be a table of metacharacters for just about any InDesign character you’ll ever need. Make a note, though, that for some reason, three of the white spaces’ metacharacters are not honored by nested styles: the third space (^3), quarter space (^4) and sixth space (^%). You won’t be able to use those for nesting.
2) Drop Caps aren’t set as a Nested Style. Their settings are just above nested styles in the same dialog. If you want to have your drop cap look different from other text in your paragraph, selected a character style from the drop cap settings. From your question, it sounds like you’re trying to apply a style by nesting it through one character, but nesting doesn’t kick in ’til after the drop cap settings (if they’re used).
Hope this helps!