Using paragraph and character styles in Publish by Zaweba

Styles are the difference between formatting a newsletter and formatting it twice. You set up a heading once, give it a name, and every heading that uses that name follows along when you change your mind. Publish by Zaweba has named paragraph styles and character styles, with "based on" and "next style" settings, so changing a style updates all the text that uses it.

If you have only ever made text bigger and bolder by selecting it, styles can look like extra work. They pay for themselves the first time someone asks for all the headings to be a different colour on the night before printing.

Two kinds, two jobs

A paragraph style describes a whole paragraph: its font and size, its alignment, the spacing above and below it, its indents and the rest. Headings, body text, captions and small print are the usual candidates. Apply the style by placing the cursor in a paragraph and choosing it, and the whole paragraph takes on the look.

A character style is for a few words inside a paragraph. Think of a price picked out in a colour on a menu, the name of a speaker in a programme, or a word or two that should always appear in a certain way. A character style changes only the selected words, and it leaves the rest of the paragraph alone.

Keeping the two separate is what makes styles flexible. Your body text style can change size without touching the coloured prices, and the price style can change colour without upsetting the paragraph it sits in.

Building a family with based on

"Based on" lets one style inherit from another. Suppose you make a body text style and then a caption style based on it, smaller and in italic. Later you change the body font. The caption picks up the new font too, but keeps its own smaller size and italic, because those were the things you set differently.

A sensible arrangement is one plain base style for running text, with most other styles built on it. Headings might share their own base, so a family of heading levels changes font together. Once the family is set up, you can change the whole feel of a publication by editing one or two styles at the top.

Be a little careful with long chains. If every style is based on the one before, a small change at the top can travel further than you expect. Two or three levels are usually plenty.

Next style for faster typing

"Next style" decides what happens when you press Enter at the end of a paragraph. Set a heading style's next style to body text, and after typing a heading and pressing Enter, you are straight into body text without choosing it. For a newsletter that alternates headings and paragraphs, that removes a lot of small clicks.

Body text usually has itself as its next style, so paragraphs continue in the same style until you choose otherwise.

Styles and the rest of the app

Styles are also what the font schemes in Publish work through. A font scheme restyles the heading and body styles, so a publication built on styles can be given a completely different set of fonts in one go. A page where every heading was formatted by hand will not follow along in the same way.

Find and replace leaves formatting intact when it replaces text, so editing words in styled paragraphs does not undo your work. And because copy and paste keeps formatting inside the app, styled text moved between boxes stays styled.

Mistakes worth avoiding

The most common one is mixing styles and hand formatting. If you apply a heading style and then make one heading bigger by hand, that heading stops matching the rest, and the next change to the style will leave it behind. When you want a different look, it is better to make a new style.

The second is having too many styles with similar names. Heading, Heading 2, New heading and Heading copy quickly become a puzzle. Give styles names that say what they are for, such as Story heading, Caption or Price, and delete the ones you no longer use.

Set up a handful of styles early in a job and use them every time. In Publish by Zaweba that small habit keeps a long publication consistent from the first page to the last.