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Alright. So we have seen the Eyedropper tool right here, which is certainly tricked out,
it's the best implementation of an Eyedropper tool that I have seen.
The only problem that I have with it and the reason that I don't actually use it on a regular
basis when I'm laying out pages is that it really offers a strange marriage of
convenience and inconvenience. On one hand you can just go ahead and lift
some attributes and apply them very quickly to some other type inside of a document.
On the other hand, if you want to lift some attributes and not other attributes, you have
to actually dig in to the tool by double clicking on it, change some settings,
click OK, go ahead and lift some new settings and on and on.
So that part, I don't think is very convenient. The better way to work is to lay down some
style sheets that represent the core formatting attributes
that you are going to want to replicate over and over again.
I'm here to tell you every single kind of text that I have inside of a document, every
single word of text. Every single letter of text is linked to some
style sheet by the time I get done with it. I recommend you do the same as well. They
are that useful, that powerful, that you need to be using them on a regular basis.
So tell you what, in the remaining exercises of this chapter, I'm going to introduce you
to style sheets, the five kinds of style sheets that are going
on inside of InDesign. Probably it's going to go too quick for you
by the way. So you may want to work along with me. You
may want to just sit back and relax, and then in subsequent chapters,
we will dig into each and every one of the various kinds of style sheets and see how
they work. Alright. So it here goes.
What I want you to do is, go up to the Type menu and notice that here is our first group
of style sheets. There is Character Styles, and this command
by the way brings up a palette. All of the style sheets commands bring up
palettes, because that's how you get to style sheets in InDesign.
And some of them have keyboard shortcuts, like Shift+F11 here for the Character Styles.
Character Styles affect independent characters of type or characters and words of type,
and they allow you to store character level formatting attributes like typeface, and leading
and type size and so on. Paragraph Styles affect entire paragraphs
at a time and they go ahead and store not only paragraph level formatting attributes
like alignment, and paragraph spacing, but also character level formatting attributes.
Then we have, if you go over here to the Window menu, you can see Object Styles, which also
has a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+F7, or Command+F7 on a Mac, for what
it's worth. Object Styles allow you to go ahead and save
object level formatting attributes, which include things like text wrap
and anchored object settings and fill and stroke as well as potentially Paragraph Styles,
which themselves can include Character Styles. So a lot of these styles include other types
of style sheets as well. Then finally if we go down to Type & Tables
here, you can see these guys in here, we have got Table Styles,
which has no keyboard shortcut, which affects entire tables at a time and then Table Styles
include Cell Styles, which style individual cells and they can
include character and paragraph level styles as well as we will see.
Now in the remaining exercises of this chapter, I'm going to be focusing on the two most common
and the two most useful kinds of style sheets in my estimation anyway, which
are Paragraph Styles and Object Styles. Coming right up stay tuned.