Hi, I'm Erica Gamet with InDesign Secrets. In this video I'm going to show
you how to use the Based On feature when using text styles in InDesign.
Basing a style on another—or creating a style hierarchy—lets you update and change
many styles all at once and it also makes sure that your document styles are
kept consistent and in sync with each other. So in this document I have my
first style all set up and that's my body text. I generally take the style
that I think will be most prevalent in my document and use that as sort of my
base or my starting point. Most of my other styles are going to be based on
this style and then, that way if I decide to, say, change the font in this body text,
all my other styles that are based on that will also change to the new font. So
I already have the body text style defined, and now I'm ready to make a
header style. So usually what I do is create a new text frame and I'll type in
some text. "This is the Header." And I'm going to select that text or just put my
cursor inside the paragraph because it is paragraph style and I'm going to
assign the body text style to it. Now I want to make any changes that are going
to be specific to the header style. So I'm going to select this text and I'm
going to make it bigger. Let's make it 36 point. I'm going to make it bold…use the
pulldown menu if I want…I used my keyboard shortcuts. And I also want to
make it all caps, so I'm gonna use a keyboard shortcut for that as well:
Shift-Command- or Shift-Ctrl-K to make that all caps. Now when I made those changes,
down in the body text, I can see that there's a little plus and that shows me
that there are overrides, So I've made changes. I've put bold, 36, and all caps. So
what I want to do now is create my header style based on the changes I just
made. To do that, I'm going to Option- or Alt-click on the Create New Style button
and it opens up the New Paragraph Style dialog box. And I'm just going to go
ahead and call this "Header." I don't really need to do anything else because
the work's already been done for me. I can see that it's already based on body text.
That's because I assigned body text before I created the new style and then
it also added those overrides in. So it's body text, plus bold, plus 36-point, plus
all caps. The thing to keep in mind here is that everything that's in body text
will update. If I change body text, it will update in this particular
header style…with the exception of any overrides I made. So it will remain bold, 36
points, and all caps, but everything else that underlying style, when that gets
changed, this style will also update. So all I need to do at this point is just
tell it OK…oh and make sure that Apply Style to Selection is on…that means
everything I've already got selected that style will be applied to. I say OK
and now my header style is applied to that style that's there. I'm gonna do one
more. I'm gonna create another one and say, "This is the subtitle," select it all,
click body text again, Option- or Alt-click on the Create New Style. We'll
call this Subhead, based on body text… and here I can create some changes as
well. If I didn't do it earlier, I can make the changes right here inside the
dialog box. So I come in here…let's go ahead and change this to italic and
we'll make it just slightly bigger…maybe 22-point. I want to make sure that
Apply Style to Selection is on and I can see that it's body text, plus italic, plus
22. We'll say OK to that. Now I have those styles set up. Now if I were to go
ahead and make changes to the body text style…let's just come in here and we
change the font, let's say to…let's do Palatino…there we go.
Now, everything changed. Because the base style changed to Palatino and I didn't
override the font in any of my other styles. So when I make a change here, it
updates through all my styles. Let's say OK to that. Now, this also works in
character styles, though I use this a little less frequently for those. And
that's mostly because my character styles are fairly simple and streamlined.
I find that tying them to other styles adds a layer of complexity to them and
that just generally doesn't work for my workflow, but it might for yours. Either
way though, basing one paragraph style on another paragraph style is an easy way
to update and maintain consistent styles throughout your document.
Well, I hope you found this tip helpful. Be sure to check out InDesignSecrets.com for thousands
of InDesign articles and tutorials and to subscribe to our monthly publication,
"InDesign Magazine. Thanks for learning with us!