Do paragraph styles go in documents or templates?

[Guest]

If paragraph styles don't belong in templates, what kinds of things do belong in templates so you're set up for success when you create a new document? 

Thanks! 

[Guest]

Ok, thanks! 

So if you have a font, but there's several variations of it - different sizes, different spacing, bolded, italicized, etc. - would these all be different styles or each its own style? 

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Without seeing the job or knowing the workflow, I would say "yes--give each one its own style". Whether they are based off of another style would depend on the number of changes to each style.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The simple answer is yes, each of those would be their own style. A style, once defined, is fixed, should be identical in all instances and should be overridden very selectively, if ever.

The more complex answer here is that you need to gain a full understand of what styles are — in general app use, and in ID's paragraph and character styles in particular. If you see a document as "this head has this font, and this head has the same font but smaller, and this one is italicized"... you're looking at the matter from the viewpoint of the elements, the pieces, and not from the more "holistic" view of what styles are.

The other side of that is that once you understand, in the more encompassing sense, what styles are — you start to see documents as collections of styles, which is more efficient and professional than "this font here, this font there, this spacing on this paragraph, that spacing on that one" etc.

[Guest]

Ok. Thank you! That makes sense. I still don't really understand when or when not to use overrides, since I see them in a lot of documents. I've created a system for the current document I'm working on, and I don't know if it's correct but I'm trying to limit the use of overrides. 

[Lukas Engqvist]

It may seem intimidating at first, but when you get that last minute chage you are glad you have a solid structure.

When you make the Paragrah styles, also tag them for export so you are on a good start to accessibility.

Also you can import Text styles from the Paragraph Style Menu. You may even want to have a stylesheet template as a start to the templates you make.

Giving people the building blocks helps them build consistent documents and in my opinion a templates should be a part of a branding kit (brand manual). 

[Guest]

I will have to look into export tags. I'm not sure what they are. Thanks! 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

To be fair, 95% of designers will never use them on 99% of projects. They are a low-level way to tweak how styles are exported to PDF and EPUB (and have one very useful feature hidden in the list for that!) But in general you can set them to defaults and take them out of most simple export processes. But you can do useful tricks and a lot of technical "clean up" by using them in more complex export projects.