How do Paragraph styles and Character styles effect one another?

[mistercitizen]

I ocassionally am puzzled by the interactions between Paragraph styles and Character styles. Does one overide the other, does one take precedence?

I don't see how they are used any differently - are Character styles meant to be implemented within a block of text which already has a P-style applied - for example, to bold some words within a paragraph?

Also, when working on larger documents, is it best to determine all of the C and P styles before inserting the text - or is it better to do it as you go along? What approach do you take when working on larger documents?

Thanks for you help!

 

[Genimuse]

Character styles override paragraph styles, and that's the primary reason for using both. You're exactly right about how chracter styles are to be used.

I try to determine what styles I'll have in advance (by looking through the text). Ideally the original text already has some style info in it, and you can just "hijack" the styles after importing. If not then there's a whole lot of work to do.

Some tips: create keyboard shortcuts for every style, using a system that makes sense to you -- I like to use 0 for body, 1 for a major head (like section), 2 for the next subhead, etc., with larger numbers for oddball paragraph styles nad adding in the alt-key to the shortcut for "alternate" versions of the style (special cases).

Then I select all the text and apply my body style. Then using the control/command key and the down-arrow, I jump from paragraph to paragraph, apply the paragraph style as needed. If you're any good at the numeric keypad (doing this very thing in the early days of QuarkXPress taught me to be), you can whip through text pretty fast, though it's still very time consuming to do a really large book (like a textbook). Still, that magical ability to later, say, decrease the Space Above of style Sub-Subhead by 1 point and have it ripple instantly through the whole document is amazing, and it's way faster than not using styles.

It it's complex text that has no style information and there's a pattern to the text -- say an extra blank line before each subhead, that kind of thing -- I use a text editor and regular expressions to add style tags in manually first and then import.

 

[Genimuse]

Oh, and the fact that paragraph styles can by applied by simply having your cursor in the pararaph (rather than having the paragraph selected) is how I can use the control-downarrow technique.

 

[mistercitizen]

Wow! Thanks for your thorough response - I will take your suggestions on board. It certainly sounds like you are experienced in type-setting large documents.

If anyone eles has some methods in additon to Genimuse's comment, please contribute them.