Character Styles

A character style is a set of formatting attributes that can be applied to a letter, word, or character in a single click. Unlike paragraph styles, which apply to an entire paragraph, character styles apply only to portions of the paragraph. Character styles are used when a word needs to be made bold, or colored independently from the style applied to the paragraph. Character styles do not have as many options as paragraph styles since they do not include many of the paragraph formatting options such as indents. Character styles simply apply character attributes such as fonts, font size, kerning, and font color.

Open the Character Styles panel under Window Type > Character Styles. To create a character style, format text with a font, size, and color and create a style from that text. Select the text and choose New Character Style… from the Character panel dropdown menu.

General gives an overview of the current settings of the character style.

Basic Character Formats allow you to edit settings for the Font Family, Font Style, size, leading, kerning, tracking, case settings (all caps, small caps), position (subscript or superscript), underline, or strike through.

Advanced Character Formats is where you can edit horizontal and vertical scale, baseline shift, character rotation, and Dictionary Language.

Character Color is where you can edit the fill or stroke color of the text, and settings for overprint.

Open Type Features is where you can edit Open Type additional features such as ligatures and contextual alternates.

Creating, Applying, and Editing

The creation and editing of character styles is the same for paragraph styles. Applying a character style requires the letter or word(s) to be selected with the Type tool. It is not good practice to apply a character style to entire text container. If the entire text needs to be formatted, use a paragraph style.