Create a Character Style?

The Character Styles panel is used to create, name, and apply character styles to text within a paragraph. These styles are saved with the document for which they were created, and will be displayed in the Character Styles panel each time you open that particular document. To create a style, you can either use the characteristics of type you’ve already formatted on the page, or build a new style from scratch via the Character Styles panel menu. To do the former, make sure your cursor is positioned within the text you’re using to create the style, click on the panel menu icon in the top-right corner of Character Styles panel, and select New Character Style. In the New Character Style dialog, go down to the Style Settings section to review the attributes you’ve chosen. If you want to tweak anything, click on the options in the menu on the left side of the panel to access various text attribute settings. Once you’re satisfied, click OK, and your new style will appear in the Character Styles panel. Repeat the process for any other styles you’d like to create, and then save the document. You can also copy the styled text and paste it into a new document, and the styles will be carried over with the type, or you can import the styles into another document (see page 130). Whenever I start a project, I create a new document and lay out all of my various text elements—headers, body text, captions, etc.—in separate text frames. Then I manually apply the styling—font, size, weight, color, etc.—to each text element. When I’m satisfied, I create character styles for each type of text.