From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Editing, clearing, and redefining styles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Editing, clearing, and redefining styles

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- [Instructor] Now that we've talked about creating and applying paragraph and character styles, you need to know how to edit them. But first, let me talk about style overrides. I'm going to go to the layout menu and choose "previous spread." Now I'm going to place my text cursor in this paragraph over here on the right page. When I open my paragraph styles panel, you can see a little plus symbol right next to the style name, the one that's highlighted. In fact, anywhere I click inside this paragraph, you'll see that plus sign, and that plus sign means there's formatting on top of the paragraph style, something different. This is called a local override. In fact, if you hover your cursor on top of that paragraph style, it'll even show you a little tool tip that shows you the override. Here it says the size and letting has been changed. You can make local formatting or local overrides more obvious by clicking this little A plus button in the upper right corner of the paragraph styles panel. That turns on the local override alert, which is this blue highlighting. That just says "watch out, there's formatting on top of or different than the paragraph style." Now, if you ever have a document where you see that plus sign or blue highlighting, you can do one of three things. You could ignore it, I don't recommend that. Or you could redefine the style to match the new formatting, and I'll show you how to do that in just a moment. Or you can get rid of it by clicking inside the paragraph and then coming down to the bottom of the paragraph styles panel and clicking the "remove local overrides button." As soon as you click on "remove overrides," anything that was done to that paragraph on top of the paragraph or character style definition is removed. Now it's back to the way it was supposed to look, and the plus sign and the highlighting disappears. A little higher, in this paragraph, we see a different kind of override. This blue highlighting is off to the left of the paragraph, and that means the local override is paragraph formatting, like someone changed the indents or something. Let's remove that too. I'll click in there and then click the "remove overrides button." Next, I want to show you how to edit these styles. For example, the cursor is currently flashing inside this paragraph, and I'd like to change the formatting, not just here, but the formatting for all the paragraphs in this file that look like that. There are two ways to edit paragraph or character styles. The first way is to change it on the page, like I'll select this whole paragraph and then I'll change it from light italic to, say, semi bold. Now I'm applying a local override, right? And you can see the plus sign down here in the paragraph styles panel. Now, while that text is still selected, I'm going to look inside the paragraph styles panel menu, and I'll choose "redefined style." This takes the formatting from wherever the cursor is right now, and it redefines the style based on it. Boom, it's updated throughout the document. I love that. Sometimes though, you want to make an edit to a style and you don't have an example to work with, or maybe you just prefer editing styles in the dialog box. You can edit a style simply by double clicking on it, but I want to encourage you not to do that because it's too easy to accidentally apply the style to some text or make it your document default style, which might mess you up later. That's especially true when you're editing character styles. So instead of double clicking on a style, you should right click or Control click if you have a one button mouse. In this case, I'm going to right click on "flower headers" inside the paragraph styles panel. Then I'll click edit. Now I can edit this paragraph style. For example, I'll come over to basic character formats, and I'll change the font family to, say, Montserrat, and then I'll hit tab, and let's try semi bold. And let's go crazy, we'll change the character color too. I'll make it this red color. Great. Now let's click okay, and you can see that every place in my document that this style had been applied is now changed. I have to be honest, there is something that's almost magic to me about editing styles in InDesign. This ability to make a small change in one place that ripples throughout a document is incredibly powerful.

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