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We believe that all InDesign training courses should incorporate the correct use of styles to enhance workflow and maintain consistency within a document and across a range of documents. Most delegates on our InDesign training courses know what styles are: a series of named formats which can be applied to your text so you don't have to manually apply formatting attributes one by one. Even new InDesign users are probably familiar with the use of styles in Microsoft Word: “Heading 1″, “Heading2″, “Normal”, etc. However, InDesign's implementation of styles is much more sophisticated and, when we run InDesign training courses in London, we always emphasise their importance.

The salient benefits of using styles are, firstly, consistency: the same formats are faithfully applied each time without variations accidentally occurring. Secondly, rapidity: if a heading needs six formatting attributes applied then, without the use of styles, you will have to apply all your attributes manually.

If you use a style, you can apply the text formatting with one click or a single keystroke. A third benefit is the ability to change the appearance of your text simply by changing the definition of your styles. A less obvious advantage to using styles in InDesign is what might be termed scalability. Styles figure prominently in some of the program's advanced techniques and documents that have no styles cannot benefit from these features. For example, a main aspect of creating XML-based layouts, is that of mapping XML tags to styles to document styles. A second example is tables of contents. (InDesign creates these from the styles used in a document. ) In defining the table of contents, one specifies which styles one wishes to include. When the table of contents is created, InDesign searches for each piece of text in those styles and puts the appropriate page number next to it.

In actual fact, the table of contents feature is more powerful than the name suggests since it can be used to generate a list of anything within a document as long as a particular style has been used consistently throughout. For example, if every photo in a document has a caption formatted with a particular style, the table of contents facility can be used to produce a “list of photographs”. A third example of the advanced use of styles is when working with books; a feature which enables multiple InDesign documents to be treated as one entity for such operations as preflighting, printing and the production of tables of contents. Different users can work on each document within the book and the styles used within all documents can be streamlined by a process called synchronisation. Because of its importance, we include styles both on our beginners InDesign training courses and on or advanced InDesign training. On our advanced training courses, we explain the use of facilities like nested styles whereby a character style can be embedded within a paragraph style and automatically applied to a given set of characters or words within the paragraph; for example, it might be to all characters up to the first occurrence of an em dash or a colon.
The writer of this article conducts HTML/XHTML training throughout the UK.

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