style

[kirkcudbright]

Tonight I went to my first meeting of the InDesign User Group. The two-hour presentation on "From InDesign to the Web" can be roughly summarized as follows:

1. Styles are good. Seriously, the first hour was a review of paragraph, character, and object styles - how to set them up, how to apply them, how to import them from another InDesign document, and how to map them from Word or RTF documents. Okay, there were people there who weren't aware of the last bit, but even as an amateur designer, I've already gotten the religion of styles.

2. Exporting an InDesign doc to xhtml (a CS3 feature, replacing "Package for GoLive") exports the style names, but none of the style attributes. Granted, the set of web-safe fonts is extremely limited, but it could at least export type sizes, colors, leading, etc. Jesus, Adobe, it's not rocket science.

3. Once you've re-defined all your styles in DreamWeaver, you can create an external CSS style sheet document by cutting and pasting the style code from the html document to the css document. Really. Did no one at Adobe/Macromedia go through the workflow, and say "This is a giant hack"?

Comments

[folzgold.livejournal.com]

Can you explain styles for me? I'm an InDesign user, so it might be helpful.

Graphic teaching hat dusted off.

[bridgetminerva.livejournal.com]

Syles are a set of fromatting rules when allow you to define the "look" of a layout
An example of a style would
Labled:"paragraph"
The defining characteristics would be: Font: Optima, Size: 12 pt, Leadin: 16pt, Left: justified, Horizontal scale:97%

So you could highlight a boat load of text then click on the label "Paragraph" All the text would change to match the definition. But hold on 16 LEading is too much and your text wont fit. So by changing just the defining characteristic Leading: 14 pt, all of the Stuff you applied "paragraph" to will also change. If you need to squish just a bit more text in you can change the Horizontal scale:95%. Suddenly all the "paragraph" text gets a little thinner and more stuff fits on a line.

Re: Graphic teaching hat dusted off.

[folzgold.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should start doing this...

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

The value proposition of styles is that a) they help you maintain a consistent look and feel across a document, because all paragraphs of the same type have the same attributes (typeface, size, leading, etc), as Bridget said; and b) if you change the style definition, the changes are immediately applied to all paragraphs of that style, without having to do a search-and-replace.

You can also have nested or derived styles, which are based on an existing style. So I might have a headline style that's big and bold, and a sub-head style that's a bit smaller and italicized. If I change the font for the headline style, it would get reflected in the sub-head as well.

If you start a new document, you can import styles from another document or a template, so you can maintain a common look and feel.

The short point is that you want to avoid manually formatting text if you can avoid it.

This isn't just an InDesign thing; word processors have styles, for the same reasons.

[folzgold.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Maybe I have been shooting myself in the foot the whole time...

[catness.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I loathe InDesign so much. Give me back my PageMaker you fucking Adobe fucks!!!!

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

I've never used PageMaker (or FrameMaker, which our doc department uses), so I can't really compare. I do know that it blows the pants off Quark.

[bridgetminerva.livejournal.com]

IS the group worth it?

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

I don't know yet. I'll have to see what the next meeting is like.