I need to basically tag some text, to associate it with a particular issue. I want to change its color, and that’s all. I can find no method to mark text in a searchable way without overriding all of its characteristics.
We don’t use character styles anywhere in our documents, so this would be a safe way to do so. But how do you clear any characteristic from a character style that you don’t want to set?
In InDesign, all style types (paragraph, character, object, table…) are designed so that they change only what you ask them to change. In the style definition, any format options you don’t touch won’t change. So it already works the way you want, by default.
The picture below shows what to look for. Notice that in the first group of Basic Character Formats, everything is blank except Font Style, which is Semibold. That’s because I selected only Semibold, which means when I apply this character style, the only thing that changes is that Font Style becomes Semibold. Because Font Family, Size, etc. are blank, applying this character style won’t change those values, they stay as is.
Also, it’s very important to understand that the check boxes in the second options group have three states, because this also affects how they change selected text. A check box in a style definition can be empty (disabled), checked (enabled), or with a line in it.
You can see in the picture that when this character style is applied, Underline and Strikethrough will definitely be turned off, the text’s current Ligatures setting won’t be changed, and No Break will definitely be turned on. If you want to cycle through those three options for a check box, click it until it’s set the way you want.
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