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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles

from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius
www.cheliusgraphicservices.com
Chax Chat Podcast
[email protected]
@chadchelius

Setting up your document

When setting up a document in InDesign, your primary element is going to be the page size. It’s important to get that cor-
rect right from the get-go. Beyond that though, there are a number of elements that you can define when setting up your
document. Let’s take a look at some of different areas that you can define and why they’re important.

Page Size
Also called the trim size, this is important for obvious reasons. The job you’re creating has a predefined size that you want to
conform to in order to get the job right.

Bleed
If your project bleeds, you’ll want to make sure that you define the bleed value when setting up the document. This can be
done later on of course but you might as well get it out of the way when you’re setting up the document. Standard bleed in

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

the printing industry is 1/8” however some projects such as perfect-bound Columns
books often require more than that. When in doubt check with your printer.
Columns can be useful when defining columns of text in a document or
when using a grid system in your design. Columns defined in the New Doc-
Margins ument dialog box will appear as column guides on the master page of your
This in my opinion is one of the most overlooked aspects of setting up a document once created. Your text columns or text frames don’t have to
document. Often times I see users leave the margins at their default settings match the grid exactly but can instead use divisions or multiples of the grid
and then once the document is created, they’ll manually add guides to the in your design. Keep in mind however that if you turn on the Primary Text
document to define their working area. This is exactly what margins are for! Frame option, those text frames will match the columns defined in the New
When determining the margin settings for a document, you want to think Document dialog box. You can change these later on though. See the figure
about the “live” area of the page. The area where most of the content (spe- below to see how columns can be used and referenced in a document.
cifically textual content) is going to reside. From there, decide how big your
margins should be and set them based on that decision.

The text frames don’t have to match the columns exactly but can be used as a
reference for how to divide a page in InDesign.
The red outline roughly defines where the margins should be defined when set-
ting up a new document.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Slug • Word also utilizes styles to format text however more often than not,
styles aren’t used with the exception of the Normal style in Word.
The slug can be useful for displaying information about a project such as
After importing a word document into InDesign, you may notice a
job number, customer, due date, etc. The slug appears outside of the trim
small disk icon next to the name of a style in the Paragraph or Charac-
area of a document and will never appear in the final product. It can appear
ter Styles panel which indicates that those styles were imported from
however when printed or when exported to another format such as PDF.
Word.
• Although this can be changed, the default behavior in InDesign is for
it to retain all formatting from the imported file. Due to the nature of
Flowing text content how most users use Word, this formatting gets imported as manual
overrides to the current paragraph style. The danger here is that if you
For most of us, the text in our projects is created by someone else, in
apply a different paragraph style and clear the overrides, you lose all
another application. Although it’s possible to enter text content in InDesign,
of that manual formatting such as bold, italic, etc.
as a designer, we’re typically not responsible for that task. Often times text
content is provided to us as a Word document but it could be provided in
a variety of other formats as well. In this project, we’re using a Word docu- Retaining manual formatting
ment to flow text into InDesign. To take control of manual formatting that comes in when importing a Word
document, I like to implicitly apply character styles where appropriate. This
Placing text typically includes bold, italic, and bold italic formatting but can include
Get text into an InDesign layout is pretty simple. Simply choose File > Place others as well. Start by creating character styles for each formatting appear-
and navigate to the location of the Word document, select it, then click OK. ance that you need. Next, open the Find/Change dialog box by choosing
InDesign places that text into the document. In this project we placed the Edit > Find/Change. In the Find/Change dialog box, leave the Find what and
text into the first frame on the first page which has been defined as a Pri- Change to fields blank but in the Find Format section define italic in the font
mary Text Frame. Using the Primary Text Frame in combination with Smart style field of the Basic Character Formats section. Now in the Change For-
Text Reflow, will automatically add as many pages to the document as are mat section, choose the Italic character style from the Character Style drop-
needed to place all of the text from the Word Document. Although this pro- down menu and click the Change All button. This basically tells InDesign to
cess is simple enough, there are a few things you should be aware of when find any text formatted as Italic, and apply the Italic character style to the
placing Word content into InDesign. text. Because Character Styles always win over Paragraph styles, the italic
formatting will be retained regardless of which Paragraph Style is applied to
the text. Repeat these steps for any other formatting necessary.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

The Primary Text Frame

The Primary Text Frame is one of those underutilized features in InDesign.
It gives users the ability to change the text container on a document page
by applying a Master page to that document page that has a Primary Text
Frame defined. Long time users of Adobe InDesign will know the pain of
flowing long documents and even when applying a different master, would
still have to manually force that text to flow into the text frame on that
master. It was a huge pain. That’s why I love the Primary Text Frame. You can
Define a Primary Text Frame in one of two ways:
1. When creating a new document, in the New Document dialog box, sim-
ply turn on the Primary Text Frame check box. This puts a Primary Text
frame on the A-Master page (both pages of the master in the case of a
facing page document) of the document.
2. In an existing document, go to the Master page(s) and draw a text frame
at the size and position desired. Now in the upper-left corner of the
frame, click on the icon to enable the Primary Text frame for that frame.
In the case of a facing page document, you’ll want to create another
frame on the facing page and link the two frames together. Once linked,
both frames become Primary Text Frames.

Performing a Find/Change to retain manually formatted text using a Character

Style.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Creating Paragraph Styles

Most designers are familiar with the concept of Paragraph styles in InDe-
sign but I’m also surprised at how often I see them misused. To often I see
users reach for Character styles first and then wonder why styles don’t work
the way they expect them to. They think it’s the program that’s faulty but in
reality it’s not.
Regardless of whether you’re a beginning, intermediate, or advanced
InDesign user, if you take anything away from this LAB I want it to be that
you always start formatting your text using Paragraph Styles. No question.
The role of Paragraph Styles in InDesign is to apply global formatting to text
in the document at the paragraph level. So basically all of the formatting
Enabling the Primary Text frame by clicking on the icon in the upper-left corner
to control how the different paragraphs should appear such as heading,
of the frame.
subhead, body, body indent, body drop cap, caption, etc.
You’ll find the Primary Text Frame to be incredibly valuable. Create The easiest way to create a Paragraph Style is to format text in your docu-
another Master page and add a Primary Text frame on that page but change ment the way you’d like it to appear. Then with your cursor in that formatted
the position and size of the frame. When you apply this master to a page, text, hold down the option (Mac) or alt (Windows) key and click the Create
the text will morph to the properties of the Primary Text Frame from the New Style button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. Although
master. This is really beneficial for creating chapter openers, changing the it’s not necessary to hold down the shortcut key when creating the style,
number of columns on a page, as well as changing the position of the text it gives you the opportunity to provide a legitimate name for the style and
on the page. adjust other attributes of the style during the creation process. Without
If you’ve enabled the “Delete Empty Pages” checkbox in the Type prefer- holding down the key, your styles will simply be named paragraph style 1,
ences, InDesign will remove empty pages for you. This takes some getting paragraph style 2, etc. Not very helpful. The Paragraph Style dialog box also
used to as you’ll find your document ebbing and flowing as you make allows you to choose whether you want this style to be based on another
changes. After a while though, you’ll have confidence in the ability of InDe- style or not and allows you to setup the Next Style feature.
sign to make these changes for you.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

documents, I typically will create a foundational Body style to use in my

document. Then I’ll create a Body Indent style that is based on that Body
style as well as a Body Drop Cap if desired that is based on the Body style.
This makes sense because the foundation for all of the styles is the same
with just a few minor tweaks between them. Once again, if down the road
you decide that body needs an adjustment, you simply edit the Body style
and Body Indent and Body Drop Cap update as well keeping your format-
ting consistent.

Creating a new Paragraph Style.

Basing one paragraph style on another

The Based On property in the New Paragraph Style dialog box allows you
to base one style on another style. What this means is that it uses another
style as the foundation for another style then you can add additional attri-
butes on top of that. Basing one Paragraph Style on another is very helpful
in some situations because if you edit the style that other styles are based Basing one paragraph style on another paragraph style.
on, those styles will get updated as well if a change is every made to that
base style. Use this feature when it makes sense. For example when I build

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Basing one style on another isn’t without it’s faults, it can also get you in
trouble if you’re not careful. By default if you have an existing style applied
to text when you create a new Paragraph Style, InDesign will automatically
base that new style on the style that’s already applied to the text. I see this
all the time with documents that have text flowed in from Word. The Word
document has the Normal style applied to all of the text. Now as your cre-
ate new styles in InDesign, every style by default is based on Normal. This
is anything but normal. It’s abby-normal! This just creates a domino effect
moving forward that can end up being a mess. So even if you have a style
applied to text when you create a new style, make sure to choose “No Para-
graph Style” from the Based On drop-down menu to avoid this problem.

Using Next Style

The Next Style option when defining a Paragraph Style tells InDesign
which style to apply when you hit enter/return to text that follows the
current style. For example, let’s say on the Subhead style, you tell the Next
Style to be Body. Now when you are typing text that has the Subhead style
applied to it, when you press enter/return on your keyboard, the style will
switch over to Body. This saves so much time in InDesign when you are typ-
ing text that has a repeatable sequence. Defining the Next Style in the New Paragraph Style dialog box.

Now you’re probably thinking “Well that’s great but I flow my text into
InDesign, I don’t type it myself.” That’s OK, InDesign still has you covered.
To utilize the Next Style feature on existing text, select all of the paragraphs
that you want to format. Now, in the Paragraph Styles panel, right click on
the first style you want to apply and choose “Apply [stylename] then next
style. InDesign formats the first paragraph using the style that you right
clicked on, then each successive paragraph gets formatted using the Next
Style that is defined in that and successive styles as well.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Applying the Next Style to existing text.

Creating Character Styles

Character styles serve a very different purpose than Paragraph Styles.
Where Paragraph Styles are responsible for the global formatting of text at
the paragraph level, Character Styles are responsible for formatting text at
the character level. When you apply a Paragraph Style, it formats the entire
paragraph regardless of how much text you have selected (if any). Character
Styles on the other hand can be used to format a character or range of char- Creating a new Character Style.
acters within a paragraph. So naturally some of the most common Character
Styles that you’re likely to create or use would be bold, italic, and bold italic To get the most bang for your buck when creating Character Styles, only
however it’s not uncommon to also have character styles for highlight, red, define the properties that the Character Style is responsible for. What I mean
blue bullet, etc. is, only define the properties that you want the style to apply. For example,
Creating a Character Style is very much the same as creating a Paragraph if you’re creating an italic Character Style, only define the italic property in
Style. Simply select the text that you’ve formatted and click the Create new the style. Don’t record the font, or the size, or the leading, or anything else.
style button at the bottom of the Character Styles panel. Where it’s a This makes your Character Style incredibly versatile because you can apply
bit different, is that if you already have a Paragraph Style applied to the it to pretty much any piece of text in your document. Apply it to a caption it
Selected text, the Character Style is only going to record the attributes that italicizes the caption text. Apply it to Body, it italicizes the Body text.
are different from the Paragraph Style that is already applied. Which leads
me to another tip about creating Character Styles.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

any styles imported from word immediately to avoid text formatting issues
moving forward.
To get the best of both worlds (retaining formatting of imported text
and keeping the formatting), I perform a find/change in InDesign to ensure
that the manually overridden text that contains the formatting is retained
moving forward even when new styles are applied. The steps to do this are
Defining only the necessary properties within the Character Style. outlined below.
1. Start by creating character styles for each unique formatting element
that you’ll need. Standard ones for me are bold, italic, and bold italic,
however you’re not limited to these options. If you have others such as
Retaining text formatting underlined, highlight, or anything else, you can create them as well.

When you import text into InDesign from an external file (i.e. Word, Rich 2. Open the Find/Change dialog box by choosing Edit > Find/Change.
Text, Text, etc.) InDesign by default tries to retain all formatting from that 3. In the Find/Change dialog box, leave the Find what and Change to fields
imported file. So bold, italic, bold italic, etc. is retained to honor the format- empty since we’re not going to change content, only formatting. In the
ting of that original file. Initially this is a good thing but the problem is that Find Format section (you may need to click on the More Options button
the overall formatting of imported text is rarely what we actually want in to see this), click on the Specify attributes to find icon and in the Basic
our layout. So we create paragraph styles to apply the appropriate format- Character Formats section choose Italic from the Style menu.
ting. This is where the problem occurs. You see, that formatting that InDe-
4. Now in the Change Format section, click on the Specify attributes to
sign retains is in the form of a manual override to whatever style is currently
change icon and in the Character Style drop-down menu, choose
applied to the text. If you apply a new style, those overrides are generally
the italic Character Style that you created in step 1 above.
retained, but if you clear overrides when applying a new style (which many
designers do for consistency), all of those manual overrides will be lost. 5. Click the Change All button to replace all instances of manually format-
Furthermore, styles used to format text in Rich text files and Word files, ted italic text with the actual italic character style. Because Character
are retained when placing those files into an InDesign document. You can Styles always “win”, any Paragraph Style applied to text that contain
tell when a Word style is imported with the text by the small “disk” icon these character styles will retain that Character Style formatting moving
located to the right of the Style name in the Paragraph or Character forward.
Styles panel. In my experience, the majority of Word users don’t use styles
at all and therefore end up using the default style in Word which is called
“Normal”. My advice is to apply an appropriate style to your text and delete

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

splitting columns as well. It’s important to understand that the Span feature
only works in a text frame that has more than one column defined. It won’t
work if your text is divided into columns using individual frames.
To use the Span feature, start by adding a paragraph into a text frame that
contains more than one column. Now in the Span Columns field, choose
how many columns you want the paragraph to Span. The text now occupies
however many columns you defined in the Span Columns field.

The Find and Change format sections in the Find/Change dialog box used to
retain formatting in text.

Spanning and Splitting Columns Choosing a value from the Span Columns drop-down menu.
The span and split features in InDesign avoid the need to put elements
in a separate frame to achieve the desired appearance in a layout. The span
and split feature is great for items such as headings and bulleted lists, but
they work in numerous circumstances. Now using the span and split feature
you can keep all of your elements in a single frame which allows content to
ebb and flow and prevents you from having to manually make adjustments
as your text reflows.
You’ll find the Span Columns feature in the paragraph formatting section
of the Control panel, in the Paragraph panel, and also in the Control panel
menu. Although the feature is called Span Columns, it’s also responsible for

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Splitting columns is similar except the Split feature divides a single col-
umn or frame into several columns for elements such as bulleted lists.

Applying the split feature to bulleted items. Anchoring an object to text.

The process of anchoring objects to text that is outlined above is very

simple and very quick to execute. One of the problems though is that HOW
InDesign anchors those objects is left to some defaults that may or may not
Anchoring Objects be beneficial moving forward. Let’s take a look at the parameters by which
objects are anchored.
When it comes to bulletproofing your documents and alleviating the
Hold down the option key (Mac) or the alt key (Windows) and click on
need to manually make adjustments to objects as text reflows, anchoring
the anchor icon in the upper-right corner of the anchored object to
them can’t be beat. Virtually any object can be anchored to text. If it’s in a
display the Anchored Object Options dialog box. You’ll see that by default,
frame or is a frame, it can be anchored.
the object is anchored based on the lower-right corner of the object and
Anchoring an object is a relatively simple process. Simply select the object
it’s horizontal position is determined relative to the text frame that the text
that you want to anchor, and click on the small blue square in the upper-
resides in. I have to say that this is almost never what I want. You see the
right corner of the frame and drag it to the location in the text where you
problem with these settings is that if you have anchored objects that move
want the object anchored.
to a different column within a frame or a different frame altogether, these
settings would likely not work and therefore mess up the relationship of
the object to the text. Since my objective in the figure above is to align the
upper-left corner of the image to the top of the text, I like to change the
Anchored Object Reference Point to that location as well. Now if you have
preview enabled at this point, you’ll notice that your image shifts at this

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

point. Don’t panic! We’ll fix that in a bit. Change the X Relative To option to Creating an Object Style
Anchor Marker and the Y Relative To option to Line (Cap Height) and then
change the numeric values for both of these options to 0. This gives you Object Styles are useful for everything from graphic frames to add strokes
a really good starting point to position your graphic. Make sure that the and image positioning properties, to text frames to control size, text inset
Preview check box is enabled and adjust the X Relative To and Y Relative To and autogrow features. Even Caption and alt text info can be defined! Also,
values until the graphic is positioned at the appropriate location. anchored object properties can be saved in an object style which makes it
really easy to reliably position objects after they’ve been anchored.
Object Styles can be created in several ways, but I find the easiest method
is to format the object as you’d like it to appear first. Then select the object
and option + click (Mac OS) or alt + click (Windows) on the Create New
Style button at the bottom of the Object Styles panel. This creates a
new Object style and records all of the properties defined for the selected
object. Holding down the option/alt key allows you to adjust the properties
of the style and give it an appropriate name before creating the style.
One thing to keep in mind with Object Styles is that they tend to want to
record way too many properties in the style. For example, by default, the
Object style will record the stroke, fill, corner options, size, transparency, etc.
This can be problematic when you’re using an object style to format frames,
each of which may contain a different color. If you record the fill property in
the Object Style, it will change the color of those objects when you may not
want that to happen. Because of this little nuance, I turn off every property
in the New Object Style dialog box that I don’t want the Object Style to
control. This makes the object style more versatile and reliable.
Changing the Anchored Object Options for more reliable positioning.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Utilizing Snippets
In the third session of my LAB, I had you utilize a couple of Snippets primar-
ily to save some time as I couldn’t walk you through the process of creating
those sidebars in the limited amount of time that I had. That being said, the
exercise of utilizing Snippets alone is a great illustration of how useful Snip-
pets are in an InDesign workflow and can save you a lot of time and repeti-
tive work.

What is a Snippet?
Technically speaking, a Snippet is a small XML document that defines
objects that it needs to reproduce. Essentially anything that you can create,
draw, place in InDesign, can be saved as a Snippet. Snippets are great for
sharing design elements with other users and for reusing elements in proj-
ects that require those same elements. Snippets are also natively used when
adding elements to an InDesign Library or a Creative Cloud Library.

Creating and Using Snippets

Creating a Snippet is quite easy. You can create a Snippet in one of two
ways. First, select an item or multiple items in your InDesign document
and choose File > Export and choose InDesign Snippet from the Format
drop-down menu. Another way is to select an item or multiple items in your
document and simply drag them from your document onto your desktop or
Creating an Object Style for an anchored object. a Finder (Mac) or Explorer (Windows) window. Your Snipped will be created
using a default name that you can rename to something more appropriate
later on.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Snippet Preferences
By default, when you drop a Snippet into an existing InDesign docu-
ment, the Snippet will be placed at the location of your cursor. This is not
ideal especially if you need the Snippet to be placed in it’s original position.
Fortunately, there’s a preference in InDesign that allows you to control how
Snippets should behave. Simply go to the InDesign Preferences by pressing
Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows) on your keyboard. Go to the File Handling
category on the left side of the dialog box and in that section you’ll find a
Snippet Import drop-down menu that provides choices for how you want
the Snippet to behave when imported into InDesign. I prefer choosing the
Original Location option so that the Snippet is placed in the same coordi-
nates on the page as it was when the Snippet was created.

Saving an InDesign Snippet.

Using an InDesign Snippet is just as easy. Simply drag a Snippet from your
desktop or folder location and drop it onto your open InDesign document.
Every element found in that Snippet will be replicated exactly as it appeared
when the Snippet was created. Now in my LAB, you could use the Snippet
in the way that I just described since I included those sidebar Snippets in
the file folder that you downloaded. The way I showed in the LAB however
was using the Snippet from the supplied Creative Cloud Library which I also
provided to you. Either method achieves the exact same result.

Changing the Snippet Import Option.

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Bulletproofing your styles that Balance Ragged Lines always makes the first line of the paragraph
longer than the rest. If you like this then you’re good but some users
Styles alone, when utilized and applied properly can save you a ton of prefer the opposite. Keith Gilbert wrote a free InDesign script that
time and help you to create a refined elegant design by consistently format- provides additional functionality for balancing ragged lines which
ting text, objects, and tables in InDesign. But why stop there? I always try to include making all lines the same length or making the last line the
work smarter, not harder and having to scour over my document looking longest line. In addition, the functionality that this script provides can
for various issues is not my idea of a good time. For this reason, I try to get also be saved in a style.
my styles to do as much of the work for me as possible. When building your • Keep Options: Want to make sure that a heading or subhead never
document and creating styles for your design elements, try to incorporate sits at the bottom of a column or frame by itself or want to control
functionality into those styles to automatically perform functions so you the number of lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph that
don’t have to do it manually. Below is a list of features I like to build into my should stay together? That’s where Keep Options come into play. Keep
styles so I don’t have to manually check for issues in my documents. options can tell a paragraph to always stay with the next X number
• Hyphenation: In most of my documents I can definitively say that of lines, or you can tell it to always stay with the previous line. Want
I never want any of my headings or subheads or captions, etc. to to make sure that a heading or chapter intro always starts at the top
hyphenate. End of story! So rather than searching through my docu- of the next page, odd page, or even page? Keep Options can do it!
ment scouring over all of my headings, checking to see if any of them Again, by incorporating Keep Options into your paragraph style you
are hyphenating, just disable hyphenation in your heading styles and ensure the behavior of text elements so you can rest easy knowing
be done. When I implement this, I know that I don’t have to check any that things will flow the way you want them to. In Session 3 of my LAB
of my headings to see if they’re hyphenating. InDesign does all of this you’ll see me tell a heading to always start at the top of the next frame
work for me. which is exactly what I needed for that bottom sidebar. No extra
• Balance Ragged Lines: Similar to above, I receive documents from returns, no column returns, no multiple returns! It just works.
clients and the majority of headings and subheads contain a soft
return at the end of the first line to force break that line to essentially
balance those lines. The Balance Ragged Lines feature in the Para-
graph Style Options dialog box (found under Indents and Spacing) will
automatically balance all of the lines in the paragraph making for a
much more pleasing headline. Once again, InDesign does this work for
me without that dreadful soft return! Now one caveat of this feature is
that it has a bias towards the first line of the paragraph which means

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Nested Styles
When it comes to automating text formatting in InDesign, it doesn’t get
much better than Nested Styles. Well, maybe GREP styles, but we didn’t
utilize them in this LAB. Still, Nested Styles give you amazing formatting
control and allow you to format large amounts of text with the click of a
button.
A Nested Style is essentially a way to automatically apply a Character
Style to text within a Paragraph Style. As long as your text is formatted in
a consistent manner, Nested Styles can be a lifesaver. To get started, cre-
ate a Paragraph Style that will be responsible for the general formatting of
the paragraph. So whatever most of the text will be formatted as should
Setting Keep Options for a Style in InDesign. be defined in this Paragraph Style. Next, create Character Styles for each
unique formatting element that you’ll want to apply to the text.
1. Edit the Paragraph Style and go to the Drop Caps and Nested Style
Section.
2. Click on the New Nested Style button. This is where you define how you
want the Character Style applied to the text that this Paragraph Style is
applied to.
3. Choose the Character Style that you want to apply from the first drop-
down menu.
4. Tell the Nested Style how you want it applied to the text. You can tell it
to be applied “up to” a specific point or “through” a specific point.
5. Choose the “trigger” that will define the end of the nested style. You
can choose a character, a letter, a number, a colon, you name it. And it
doesn’t have to be listed in the drop-down menu. Although it’s not very
obvious, you can click on the field and type your own character.
Now your not limited to just one Nested Style. You can keep stacking

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

them on top of each other. The thing to remember is that nested styles Pasting inline elements
begin at the beginning of the paragraph and are cumulative. So they pick
up where the other one left off until all of the Nested Styles are exhausted. In the LAB, I showed a fun trick that you can use when you want an inline
or anchored graphic to appear in multiple places within text in your docu-
ment. Before we go over that process, I highly encourage you to anchor the
object the way you want it to appear and save an Object Style and apply it
to that object. By doing this, even after pasting it in multiple locations, you
can still make adjustments to the anchored object by modifying the Object
Style. Once you’ve done that, we can go over the trick for pasting objects in
multiple locations.
1. Determine how you can identify the locations that you want the object
pasted into. In the LAB, all I had to do was look for a word (i.e. HOPS,
MALT, PAIRING). It may not always be this easy but if not, you can always
utilize GREP to pull out the big guns and locate the elements in your
document where you want these objects to be pasted. In this example,
Defining a Nested Style.
we used a standard text search.
2. Using the Selection tool, select the anchored object with the Object
Style applied and choose Edit > Copy.
3. Open the Find/Change dialog box by choosing Edit > Find/Change. In
the Find What field, enter the text you want to find.
4. In the Change To field, type the same text you are finding (at least in this
example), but then put your cursor in front of that text (or in another
location if you’re pasting in a different spot). Click on the @ symbol and
choose Other > Clipboard Contents, Formatted.
5. Click Change All and watch as your copied element is pasted into every
matching location in your document (or search parameter that you
defined).

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 InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles from Start to Finish
Chad Chelius

Pasting a copied object automatically using the Find/Change dialog box.

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