Insight Using Nested Styles to Control Complex Formatting in Adobe InDesign By Galen Gruman Dateline: December 5, 2005 Version: InDesign CS
It’s easy to fall into the habit of manually formatting your text, but that makes it hard to implement consistent formatting—even more so to change formatting as your design evolves. With nested styles, InDesign CS allows you to apply and control the complex formatting of paragraphs containing a variety of styles. All you need to do is set up the rules of where and how each character style is applied within a paragraph.
	Start by setting up a document and placing enough text to at least begin working through a design. Create the appropriate character styles for your special elements. Now create (or edit) your paragraph style. After you’ve set a parent paragraph style, click Drop Caps and Nested Styles to base your new styles off that option. In this numbered list here, the parent paragraph style dictates that a tab precede the numbers and another tab follow them to ensure the correct spacing and hanging indent amount.
Click to enlarge	Click New Nested Style to create the first rule. In this example, the first nested style didn’t need any character style formatting for all text through the first tab, although you do have the option of choosing a base character style through the pull-down menu. (Access any of the rules’ pull-down menus by clicking on the current phrase.) The second nested style used here applies the character style, “Num List number-QX,” to all text up to the next tab. That’s what makes the number appear as white text on a gray circle since this character style specifies the appropriate font and tint. Because there are no more nested styles defined, the rest of the paragraph takes on the paragraph style’s formatting.
	Because this is in a paragraph style, all paragraphs will now have these nested styles applied. If you’ve manually applied either local character formatting or a character style to your text beforehand using nested styles, InDesign will not override it. That’s because localized styles always override character styles and paragraph styles, and character styles always override paragraph styles. You’ll have to apply “No character style” to any text that has such local formatting for the nested style to apply.
Click to enlarge	That was a fairly simple example. Sometimes you have more than one type of formatting to apply, and you want to specify exactly how it is formatted based on the layout context. Consider a lead-in paragraph that has both a drop cap in a different font and small caps applied to the first line. Again, start by setting up your document and placing enough text to at least begin working through your design, and create the appropriate character styles. In this intro paragraph, I used a different font compressed to 90% for the drop cap, then styled the first line of the paragraph as small caps. Next, set up the paragraph style by clicking Drop Caps and Nested Styles in the pane. A drop cap is an independent “rule”—you set it up using the Drop Caps area, specifying the line depth, number of characters, and any character style.
Click to enlarge	Choose the desired nested style (here, First Line Text), scope (through or up to), and identifier (the default is Word). You’ll notice that InDesign doesn’t give you an option such as Line; all the identifiers are discrete elements such as Character, Word, Sentence, Digit, and Tab. So you’ll need to enter a manual identifier in your text after the style is defined. InDesign calls this the End Nested Style special character. After using this option, notice how the entire paragraph has that nested style. That’s because there is no End Nested character style in the text yet.
	Click OK to complete defining (or editing) the paragraph style. Now insert the End Nested Character at the appropriate place in your text (Type > Insert Special Character > End Nested Style Here). If you have hidden characters displayed (Type > Show Hidden Characters), you’ll see a light blue “” indicating that End Nested Character in your text.

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Galen Gruman is a veteran desktop publishing expert and author of the “InDesign CS Bible” and “Face to Face: QuarkXPress to InDesign.”