Bullet and Numbering colour

Yes I totally do! Thanks Barb 🙂



Kia pai tō rā


Jordan (Fozzie) Foster

Senior Academic Staff Member

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Oh, I missed your last question!

We create one paragraph style for each type of paragraph. For example, one paragraph style for the bullets, one for the body paragraphs, one for the titles, one for the subtitles, etc.

In both demos, all of my bullets are using one paragraph style called Bullets. 

~Barb

A nested style or GREP style represent two additional ways to assign a character style to part of a paragraph (beyond highlighting text and clicking it as I showed in the video).

I normally use color to help people understand styles (I'm a career InDesign trainer) but maybe it was a bad choice in this particular situation. LOL 

Here's what is important:

1. Define everything for the entire paragraph in the paragraph style. So many categories, including color.
   
   
   
2. Then you only need a character style for the words within the paragraph that need look different from the rest of the fully formatted paragraph. How do you assign that character style doesn't matter – highlight and click, GREP style, or Nested style.

Again the rule is, we do not assign a character style to an entire paragraph. That's when things start going south, quickly.  In your case with the bullets, the bullets pick up the formatting of the first character of the paragraph style. That's why you are here, asking about it. See the difference between assigning color through the paragraph style vs a character style?

~Barb

Hi @Fozzie Foster:

Can we start with this sentence?

I want my bullets (in my paragraph stlye) to inherit the stying attributes (in this case colour) from the character style that I am using to colour the entire paragraph.

By @Fozzie Foster

A paragraph style is used to style a paragraph. A character style is used to differentiate a string of text within a paragraph. There are exceptions to every rule—in InDesign as in life—but as a general rule, we never apply a character style to an entire paragraph.

As you can see in my demo below, if I change the paragraph style color, the entire paragraph turns blue, including the bullets.  I use a character style to highlight something important within the paragraph, to differentiate it from the rest of the paragraph. 

Oh, and you are correct. No need to convert bullets to text. 

~Barb

InDesign uses Character Styles to define bullet characteristics when it's desired to have them different from the 'body' text. There is no alternative, at least nothing particularly simple.

Paragraph and Character Styles are how InDesign work. Mastering them is not some time-wasting side task.

Just to clarify…this is without converting bullets to text which seems slightly destructive unless I'm missing something