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Now as you may recall from the live action introduction to this chapter or as you may
just know, style sheets are all about replicating formatting
attributes and those can be text based formatting attributes,
things like typeface and alignment and that kind of stuff, where it might be fill and
stroke attributes that you can apply to an object or to a text frame even or it
might be table formatting attributes; just scads of things you can do.
Just an amazing amount of automation that you can apply using style sheets.
But before we get into the nitty-gritty, I want to paint a few broad strokes here.
I want to show you how you can replicate formatting attributes using this very simple tool right
here, the Eyedropper tool. Now you may not even know that the Eyedropper
tool exists inside of InDesign. It's a tool that we take for granted inside
of an application like Adobe Photoshop, where you can lift a color,
really that's all you can do with the Eyedropper tool in Photoshop, is lift a color.
You can do more than that with the Eyedropper tool inside of Illustrator, where you can
lift fill and stroke and live effects and stuffs like
that. But it's even better implemented inside of
InDesign. It's a totally tricked-out tool as you're
going to see. You probably won't take advantage of it that
often, but I want you to know it's there. So let's start things off by opening this
document. It's called Seventies Quiz #2
It's found in the O1 introduction folder. Here is what I'd like to do to this document.
I'd like to take the names right here. Murray & Callander independently of the text
around them and I want the formatting to match this text over here,
this purple sort of bold, italic headline text, using the Eyedropper.
And then I will press the T key to select my Type tool.
I'll double click and hold in order to select Murray & Callander
and I will go ahead and manually select the Eyedropper tool.
I can't press the I key, because if I did I would replace this text with the letter
I. So I'll go ahead and select the Eyedropper
and then check this out. All I have to do with this tool is click inside
of the text that I want to match and I have gone ahead formatted my selected text.
I will now press the Enter key on the keypad again. You might press the Escape key, in
order to go ahead and see that I have indeed formatted my text
with a single click of the Eyedropper tool, but that's just the beginning.
As I was telling you, the Eyedropper tool is totally tricked out,
we'll see how to use it to style text all over the place in the next exercise.