QuarkXPress 8 : Working with style sheets

Working with style sheets

To quickly and consistently format text, you can save multiple attributes as paragraph style sheets and character style sheets. In general, paragraph style sheets set the general text formats while character style sheets are reserved for exceptions within the paragraph. For example, if you bold words within a paragraph, you might use a character style sheet. When you use style sheets, you can easily make global changes across a project by revising style sheets rather than manually reformatting text. You can apply style sheets quickly by clicking the Style Sheets palette or pressing keyboard shortcuts (Figure 1).

Creating style sheets

The easiest way to create a new style sheet is to first format text, then create a new paragraph or character style sheet based on its attributes. To do this, click in formatted text and choose New Paragraph Style or New Character Style from the Style Sheets palette menu. (To create a character style sheet, select text or be sure to click within text that has the appropriate formatting.) Use the Edit Paragraph Style Sheet and Edit Character Style Sheet dialog boxes to name the style sheet, specify keyboard shortcuts, and confirm the formatting (Figures 2).

Figure 2. The Edit Paragraph Style Sheet dialog box, at left, and the Edit Character Style Sheet dialog box, at right, let you name style sheets, specify keyboard shortcuts, and base style sheets on existing style sheets.

The Edit Style Sheet dialog boxes work as follows:

• Name field: Enter a name that indicates the style sheet’s use (such as Headline, Body Text, or Sidebar Text) rather than its attributes (such as Garamond or Blue). That way, you will always remember where to apply the style sheet—and you won’t have to change the style sheet name if the attributes change.

• Keyboard Equivalent field: To specify a keyboard shortcut for a style sheet, click in the field to highlight it, then press the key combination. You can use any combination of Command, Option, Control, and Shift (Mac) or Control, Alt, and Shift (Windows) with your keyboard’s function keys or keypad keys.

• Based On menu: You can base a style sheet on another style sheet. Then, changes made to the “based on” style sheet affect both style sheets. For example, you might start with one “Body Text” style sheet and base related style sheets such as “Bulleted List” and “Body Text No Indent” on it. Then, if you decide to change the font or leading, you can change it in “Body Text” and the changes affect all three style sheets.

• Character Style controls: In the Edit Paragraph Style Sheet dialog box, you can specify character attributes by embedding a character style sheet in the paragraph style sheet. If you embed the same character style sheet in all related paragraph style sheets, you can make changes to character attributes such as font or color across all paragraph style sheets by editing the character style sheet. To embed a character style sheet, choose an existing one from the Character Style menu or click New. To confirm or set character attributes without embedding a character style sheet, click Edit next to the Character Style menu.

In addition to creating style sheets from the Style Sheets palette, you can choose Edit > Style Sheets. Click New and choose Paragraph or Character from the New button’s menu. If a project is open and text is selected, you can create style sheets from formatted text. If no text is selected, you can specify attributes manually. If no projects are open, you can modify the default list of style sheets included in all new projects. In fact, you may want to change the default font included in the Normal paragraph and character style sheets since Normal is applied to new text boxes by default.

Applying style sheets

The Style Sheets palette lets you quickly apply paragraph and character style sheets (Figure 3).

• Paragraph style sheet: Click in a paragraph or select several paragraphs, then click a style sheet name or press its keyboard shortcut.

• Character style sheet: Select text and click the style name or press its keyboard shortcut.

Figure 3. In this example, the “3 Body Text No Indent” paragraph style sheet is applied to the paragraph while the “4 Runin Subhead” character style sheet is applied to the selected text, which serves as a subhead.