Working in Adobe InDesign

Helpful Hints for Style Sheets in InDesign

By Cindy Peters

For Consistency

When working with long documents in InDesign, there are options that can be used when setting up style sheets to help keep the project consistent through multiple rounds of revisions:

  • Turn off hyphenation in all headline styles (and also in subheads). It is not needed in headlines. A discretionary hyphen will work if absolutely necessary.

  • For body styles, set hyphenation for 6, 3, 3, 2 (six letters in word, no less than three letters at beginning and end, no more than 2 hyphens in a row) and turn it off for last word of paragraph.

  • Set keep options. For heads, keep all lines together, and keep with next two lines. In body styles, keep two lines together at start and end of paragraph, but avoid the option keep with next two lines or you will get some short pages.

  • In body styles, in the Justification palette, select Adobe single-line composer. With this option, you can make line-ending decisions without reflowing an entire paragraph.

    The other justification option is Adobe paragraph composer. If this is selected, InDesign makes the line-ending decisions. This can cause problems, especially in final rounds of revisions. When you’re in the last round, it’s hard to explain why a whole paragraph was reflowed just to make a single line-ending change. Unintended line-end changes can reflow an entire document by changing the line count of a paragraph.
  • In the Basic Character Formats of the paragraph style palette, you have a choice of kerning. The default* of Metrics is OK for heads and display type. In some fonts, however, Metric kerning tends to move certain character combinations too close together for body styles. For instance,

    A sample sentence kerned using Optical and Metrics styles.

    The first example above is Metric kerning. You can see that the space between the period and the A has disappeared. This is typical of this kerning method.

    The second example is Optical, with much better spacing. In long documents, it is less trouble if the kerning is set to Optical from the start. Changing kerning from Metrics to Optical after layout has been done will cause reflow.

These are simple rules, but a lot of headaches can be avoided if they are followed.

*Hyphenation, justification, and kerning method can all be set as InDesign defaults. Open InDesign by itself (with no document open). In the style palette, select [Basic Paragraph] and set the options as mentioned above, then quit InDesign. When it is opened again, your settings will be the defaults in all new documents you create. However, already existing documents will keep their individual settings.

For Ease of Use

  • Make use of the option to base one style on another. For instance, set up the style for Body. Then base styles such as BodyFirst, BodyDropCap, and Bullet on it. By doing this, specs such as font, size, and leading can be changed globally for all styles based on Body.

    The same holds true with master pages. Establish a Master with the headers, footers, and margins needed for the overall document. Then base each chapter master on the Master, changing headers and footers to reflect particular info for the chapter. That way, if a style needs to be changed (rule weight, font, etc.) globally, changing it on the Master will change it on all master pages based on it.

  • Make use of nested styles. These styles are especially useful when a special character is needed for the bullet. Establish a character style for it, and build it in as a nested style.

Cindy Peters is a print production specialist at EEI Communications. Cindy has been creating quality publications for more than 20 years. Throughout her career, Cindy has become an expert in the use of several desktop publishing applications including Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.

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