Try to think like InDesign when working with paragraphs. A paragraph is a block of text, delimited by a paragraph character, created when you press enter.
Never use new paragraphs (pressing enter many times) as a way of spacing text! Rather, use the “space after” and “space before” features, which has sub-millimeter precision and also doesn’t confuse InDesign. It is very difficult to get consistent spacing by just pressing enter many times, as pressing enter is not consistent, but depends on your line spacing, so pressing enter three times in small text will be different. Also, there is no way to change the spacing consistently after a heading using that method. It’s a quick and dirty solution but nothing else.
Line breaks vs paragraphs
Also, refrain from creating new paragraphs when you just want to make a line break, for example when you want to tell InDesign to not hyphenate a heading. Press Shift-Enter to make a line break.
Paragraph styles
Paragraph styles is a very powerful feature in InDesign. Use the Typography workspace to find it in your panels. You can also find it via the menu Windows -> Styles -> Paragraph styles.
The purpose is to create consistent styles for texts and paragraphs in your document. The more text and pages your document consists of, the more you’ll need this feature. It is similar to pre-defined text styles in Word, but more powerful and more consistent.
How do I use paragraph styles?
There are many ways, my prefered way of creating a paragraph style is:
- Enter your text in your document, and adjust size, typeface, color etc as you normally would.
- Go to the Paragraph styles panel, click the small flyout “hamburger” menu and then “New paragraph style”
- Give it a name such as “Heading 1”, don’t forget to tick “Apply style to selection“
- To apply this format to a paragraph, just click in that paragraph (no need to select the entire text, as it is delimited by a hidden paragraph character) and select Heading 1 in your paragraph styles panel.
- To edit an existing style, right click the style and choose “Edit”. Make sure you don’t first left click, as that will apply the style to the paragraph you have selected in your document.
What is character styles and how is it different from paragraph styles?
Character styles doesn’t let you set a “space after paragraph”, setting since it only applies to the characters, not the paragraph. It can be used in a complementary way with paragraph styles, so a text can have both a paragraph style and a character style. Normally I will only use paragraph styles, but sometimes I will create a character style to select text that should comply with the paragraph style but differ in some way. Perhaps you would want to highlight certain headings with a color to signify special importance.
Advanced / pro tips / common errors for working with text in InDesign
- “Next style”: When you create long documents it’s useful to define what the next style will be when you press enter (i e when you create a new paragraph). For example After Heading 1, you press enter, InDesign can automatically switch to Heading 2 or body text.
- If you think your paragraphs are “acting up”, for example when line spacing seems to have no effect, you probably have issues with hidden characters. Display them via the menu Type -> Show hidden characters. Make sure you select the entire paragraph by also selecting the paragraph character, which also has line spacing settings.
- If you want to change/update a style, go to a paragraph using that style and make adjustments (i e color etc), then right click the style and click “Redefine style”
- If you have overrides, i e you may have unintentionally made changes to text that is using a paragraph style, right click the style in the panel and choose “Apply style, clear overrides”