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Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

How do I import paragraph styles from another document

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at bringing through Paragraph Styles that we've made in our previous document. Somebody else might have made them, or we have made them, we just want to pull them through to use in our new bit of text. So we can transform from this, through to this one, where we've got our styles and our headings all done. We'll also look at how to apply this using things like shortcuts to speed up, to add the Paragraph Styles to all these different headings here. We’ll also add this pretty line that goes between the columns, and also look at automatic page numbering again. All of that, plus much, much more in this video. Actually, no more than that. Exactly how I said before is exactly what's in here, no more. So let's go and start it now.

So there's two ways to bring in Paragraph Styles that exist already. You might have them in the document you've made, or you might be pulling them from somebody else's document. The easiest way, or the most obvious way for us at the moment is over here, my 'CC Libraries', and in an earlier video we looked at how to create libraries, and how to put Paragraph Styles in here. Let's open up our Styles for this document. Let's go to 'Window', 'Styles', 'Paragraph Styles'. These things here are kind of separate in the library, they're not actually part of this document here. So to add them, all I need to do is, let's have nothing selected, and right click the Body Copy here, and say 'Add to Paragraph Styles'. There's my 'Green at Heart' Body Copy, super easy.

Let's say you're using an earlier version of InDesign that doesn't have libraries, or you're still avoiding using libraries, you can do it by the 'Paragraph Styles' panel. See this fly-out strappy line here, the hamburger menu, pop that out, and in here it says 'Load Paragraph Styles'. The cool thing about it is you don't need to export the styles from your previous InDesign file like you do in some of the Microsoft products. What we can do is, on my 'Desktop', 'Class Files' there's this 'Green at Heart Newsletter' we made in the previous tutorial, click it open, and it will look through that document, and see, it's got the styles applied to it. Which ones would you like to begin? I don't need the basic one, remember, that has nothingness. That is that kind of normal nothingness. Or these other ones, what do I need, I don't need 'Heading', I don't need 'First Paragraph'. Only because I'm not using them in this document. You might bring them all in.

At the beginning, you're not too sure-- 'GaH Body Copy' already exists, but I'll probably bring both of those through at the same time. Really, what I need is the 'Sub Heading', that's what I want to bring in. So it doesn't really matter how you bring it in, whether you're using the 'CC Libraries', or you just pull them from existing documents.

Another way, and I said two at the beginning, but there's actually three ways. If you copy and paste a bit of text from another document into this one, and 'Paragraph Styles' applied to that text, it will bring it through at the same time. If you're finding that you're getting these "Paragraph Styles' in, you're like, "How did you get in here?" It's because you've opened up some random document, copied the text out of it, and pasted it into this current document, and it's brought through the styles with it. So you might have to, when you do that, go and tidy them up by going-- actually I don't want you, I hit delete-- and clean them all up. But I want both of these.

First thing we'll do is we'll put in our ‘Body Copy' so I'm going to select it all. 'Command A' or 'Control A' will select everything. You got to make sure you're in your 'Type Tool' and you got your cursor flashing in the text box. Select it all, remember, Dan's random five clicks. So I've got them all selected and I'm going to say, I'd like the 'Body Copy' to apply. You can see this little + applied to it, it's because some of them have Bold applied to it already. I'm going to leave those just to make it a little easier to find in my case.

What I'd probably do if I was being a purist about it, I would say, down here it says 'Clear Overrides' and you'll see, it will remove the Bolds from it. But I've left those just to make it easy for us to find. Cool, huh? It's lovely to bring through 'Paragraph Styles' that have been done in another document. It's just tidied up this document quite a bit, even though there’s page justification, but that's okay. Next thing we're going to do is apply our 'Sub-Headings'. So, we're going to highlight this first one here, click 'Sub-Heading'. And it's brought through the style. What I'd like to do though in this document is I want to make a few changes. I'm going to zoom in, 'Command +', or 'Control +' on a PC. I'm going to select it, make some changes. I want to change the color, so the 'Type' here now, you'll see, in my 'Swatches' panel, little bit bigger, here's my 'Swatches' panel. I don't have half of these colors. I'm going to have to pull them from my library.

So in here, I'm going to make this 'Mid green'. And I'd like turn off a couple of things. I'd like to turn off the 'Force Catalyzation'. It's up the top here, I'm going to turn that off as well. So once I've done that I'm going to go and redefine my style, because I'd like this, in this document, to be forever. That green, and not upper case, so I'm going to right click it and there's one in there that says 'Redefine Style'. Just means, now when I go and use it-- highlight this guy, apply 'Sub Head'. This guy, I put the 'Sub Head', you can see I'm getting that new style through.

Now one thing you might find is, for a long document this can be painful. Not too bad, right, it's not too long. So, a couple of things you can do to speed this up. One is, add shortcut to it. So if I click on 'Sub Head'-- actually, this way is to click off, 'Black Arrow', nothing in the background, that's always like the default thing, click in the background, double click 'Sub Heading', and in here, I'd like to say 'Shortcut'. Now unfortunately, shortcuts only work if you got that number keyboard on your keyboard. I'm working on a MacBook Pro laptop and it has no-- it has the numbers along the top, above the letters, but it doesn't have that separate keypad to the right. Your shortcuts have to include one of those numbers. I can't use this at all. But if you are using a keyboard that has those numbers on the side you can hold down, maybe 'Command Shift' and hit '1'. And you'll get a shortcut in there. If you're on a PC, it will be 'Control Shift 1', I'm just making up a shortcut. You can make anything you like as long as it has those numbers there. But alas, I don't have that one, so the other way to do shortcuts is something called the 'Quick Edit'.

Now this is the shortcut to rule all shortcuts. What it does is, if I hover above this text here, and hold down 'Command', and hit the 'Enter' key, this pops up, it's called 'Quick Apply'. If you're on a PC, hold down 'Control', and hit 'Enter'. And what this does is - I'm going to delete all of that - is you can type in anything in this whole program. If you need it to be upper case, you can see, I type in 'upper', you can see, it goes to the shortcut of upper case, and I could do that. It's not what I want in this case, so 'Command Enter'. I want to type in 'Sub', I don't even have to write the whole word. You can see there, there's 'Sub Heading', hit return.

Now it seems-- that doesn't seem short, but I'll show you how I get my flow on. So highlight this, 'Command Enter', and see, it's pre filled out from my last setting, so I just hit return. So highlight, click at it, enter. Highlight, 'Command Enter', 'Enter'. You got to be a little slow between the 'Enter's. If you do it too fast, freaks out a little bit. 'Command Enter', 'Enter'. These here, actually bold points, we're going to do later on, so don't do those. There's headings. I thought I got all the ones bold. My bolding trick did not work. But you can start to see, doesn't matter whether you got your shortcut going because you got the number keypad, or 'Command Enter' for the 'Quick Apply'. We can speed this up. I put lots of headings in and then, towards the end, I got bored, and didn't put any more headings so you find that the first half has lots, and the second half has none. That's just because of me. So we've put in our Sub Heading, we've put in our Body Copy, you can see how we've got a 30 page document all quite quickly going. And all kind of styled up. That's the beauty of the 'Primary Text Frame' from the previous video and our little 'Styles' now.

Couple of house keeping things, if I go to the W-- if you're finding your machine's running really slowly using especially this example file for the text, the long text, it's because you might have done 'MX Spelling' on. Because these are all Latin words, and our dictionary is set to English, it's freaking out, going every single word in this 30 page document, is spelled badly. So it's checking every single one of them. Every time we move the page, it rechecks that, which is a bit of a pain. So if you're finding that ever happens, say you're working with a document that has a lot of-- it's English, but you have a lot of French words or Irish spelling for words, you might find that dynamic spellings is just slowing things down. So I'm going to go, on my Mac, to 'InDesign CC', 'Preferences', 'Spelling'. If you're on a PC, go to 'Edit', down the bottom will be 'Preferences', and go to 'Spelling'. And just turn 'Enable Dynamic Spelling' off, untick it. So it won't freak out and slow your machine down. It does, to mine all the time when I'm using these really long place holder text documents.

Another little thing, and this is just styling now, we're going to jump to our 'Master Page'. I want to put a little line that goes through the center of this. So I'm going to double click any of my master pages. How do I know I'm on my master page? - I'm going to close down 'Paragraph Styles' - It's down here, my 'A-Master'. Let's zoom out a little bit so I can see the whole thing. I'm going to grab the 'Line' tool. I'm going to draw a line that goes all the way through the middle. It's pretty good at doing it straight. And I'm going to have the 'Stroke' of this one, that same green. And I'm going to have 'No Fill'. How thick is it going to be? I can't remember, '1 point', that seems okay. I'm going to copy and paste it, and drag it over here to the other side. So, what I'll do, go to page 1, hit W, does it look kind of cool? Kind of cool? Yes, looks all right. I think I'm going to have to match the same size as that because that's a bit thick.

Let's double click this. You can skip on now, because there's nothing super interesting. We're going to add automatic page numbering. I'll select them both at the same time, and I'm going to have, maybe half a point. Looks okay. So page numbering, we did this in a previous tutorial, but we're going to do it again together. Let's double click page 'A-Master', we'll use the left 'Spread' to start with. Grab the 'Type Tool', draw out a nice 'Type Box', I'm going to type the word 'Page'. And I'm going to put in-- instead of just typing 1, remember we put in under 'Type', we're going to go 'Insert Special Character', and we're going to go 'Markers', 'Current Page Number'. What I'd like to do is-- it's set to-- can you see, it's actually picking up my Sub Heading as the default Paragraph Style, and that will happen to you if you're following me along because I did something a bit strange.

Let's go to 'Window', 'Styles', 'Paragraph Styles'. If I have nothing selected, and I click on 'Sub Heading', it's going to set it as-- every time I draw a new Type Box it's going to be that Sub Heading. So if I set it to the 'Body Copy', and I-- so I got nothing selected, switch it to 'Body Copy', now if I draw this out, it's going to be the 'Body Copy' font. What you probably want is, you got nothing selected, be on 'Basic Paragraph' or 'Body Copy', maybe that's a good one as well. It means that whenever I draw a new Type Box it's not going to try and be the Sub Heading. I'm going to zoom in, make this one 'Roboto'. I'll use 'Roboto Slab' again. 'Roboto Slab Bold', and I'll use the orange color.

How do I know it's in the center of the page? I know it's centered there There's a couple of ways we can do it. You can use the 'Alignment Tool'. I'm just going to drag it to the edges, I know it's there. It's going to go down here somewhere. I'm going to copy and paste it. The cool way, if I copy and paste it-- and you can go 'Command C', 'Command V', or 'Edit', 'Copy' and 'Paste'. But if you grab your 'Black Arrow' while you're dragging the words-- 'Page A' you hold down the 'Alt', or 'Option' key on your keyboard and drag it across, and it will make a duplicate as you're dragging. Hold down 'Alt', then start clicking, holding, and dragging, and that will duplicate it as it goes across. Now, I'm going to double check this work, double click page 1, double click page 2, page 3.

Nice work, group. Let's move on to the next one where we work on inserting blank pages, and playing with the numbering because it's starts at 1, which is going to be our cover. All sorts of fun stuff like that.