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1. Re: Book Layout - Styles etc
[Jongware] Sep 22, 2010 4:11 PM (in response to mark_hayhurst)It's a good list.
If you feel poems pop up frequently enough, and you are not quite sure about the final formatting, there is absolutely no harm in creating yet another paragraph style just for these. If you find you are still trying out different settings, you definitely want to them.
Make good use of the "Based On" property -- base as much stuff as possible immediately on "Normal", except stuff where it's more logical to use another hierarchy. For example, you should base "Bulleted List Item" immediately on Normal, because the 'normal' state of a bullet list item is without space above and below. The Bullet/Space Above and Below styles can, in turn, be based on the Bullet sec style.
Do the same with your headings, going top-down (although bottom-up has its merits too -- follow your instincts, I guess).
The base list of styles I use for scientific work contains most of your styles, plus stuff like References, Chapter Title, and Author. I also have a more expanded set, which is far more difficult to fathom at a single glance -- it comes with three different Body styles, 4 numbered and 4 unnumbered headings, and separate styles for quotes, enumerations, examples, and notes (all in all more than 30 different styles). But they are highly organized -- some of the text are not in English but in languages like French, Spanish, or German, but I only have to change the language in one single style ...
The total number of styles is inconsequential, as long as they are logical enough in their names and definitions that you don't get confused what text to set to what style.
If you have a more-or-less complete set of styles -- both paragraph and character --, first change all local formatting to character styles. Local formatting is like the occasional italic word inside a paragraph, small capitals, superscripts, or underlined phrases. It's commonly known as "fixating" local formatting, because applying a paragraph style may clear out all of the local formatting (which is not as bad as it sounds -- read on why).
Fixating the local formatting can be done with a few simple search-and-replace operations if you don't need that many; or with a script I wrote just to do this (see Preserve Local Formatting script and CS4).
After that, you can go over the text per paragraph and assign the proper style on each -- don't worry about fixing bad breaks or ugly pages yet. After you assigned all paragraphs a style, clear all remaining local formatting in one go by selecting all text and choosing "Clear Overrides" from the Paragraph panel. That'll throw out any remaining Word nasties for good, and all that's left is perfectly cleansed text. You must make sure all Word thrash gets kicked out, because if not, there is a good chance the original text attributes will linger on in your text.
Then you can go over each page, deciding you want a hard page break here or another definition of style there, and before you know it, you are done.
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2. Re: Book Layout - Styles etc
[Jongware] Sep 22, 2010 4:23 PM (in response to [Jongware])(More)
It's important to understand the difference between local (character style) formatting, and global (paragraph style) formatting.
For example, if you import your text into InDesign, and you find all headers come in formatted as Bold text, remove the "Bold" and don't replace it with a Character style "Bold"! That's because the "being bold" of the headers is not a decision on a whim -- all headers of that same level should be Bold, so you should apply that in the Paragraph style. It also has the advantage that if you decide, "nah, I don't want them bold but regular and in small capitals", you can simply change the paragraph style. In contrast, if the "boldness" in the headers is applied with a "bold" character style, then you cannot do this -- it would change all bold text in your document to small capitals.
There is, to be brutally honest, one area where InDesign may fail you.
Suppose you just imported your text, and one of the headers look like this:
1.1. A sample header (not a real one)
As per the above, you should remove the Bold, because that'll get set in the paragraph style. What about the italic word? Theoretically, you should apply a character style "Italic" to it; and when you make the header bold again using a paragraph style, the character style should add "italic", making it "Bold + Italic" -- as you intended. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and you will find the header gets to be bold with the word "not" in plain Italics.
The hyper-correct workaround is to create an additional style "Italics for in Header 1" and changing that to Bold+Italic when Header 1 is Bold, to Underline or Roman when the header is Italic, and to Italic when the header is in a regular font. But it's hardly worth the effort; you are far better off keeping this in mind, and just correcting it by applying the right character style when you see it.
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3. Re: Book Layout - Styles etc
[Jongware] Sep 22, 2010 4:27 PM (in response to [Jongware])(Even More)
After you applied all paragraph styles (and, obviously, also after you applied all character style before that!), but before going over each page in detail, it might be worth to check your global page layout -- and, in turn, how that affects your choices of point size, leading, and space before/after headings and such.
If you want to see how the document looks with slightly different margins, first enable Layout Adjustment in the Layout menu (don't worry about the list of options; I've never seen reason to change the settings and don't even know what they are supposed to do ). Then you can change the margins on your current page only (but those will not carry on to all other pages, so it's just to "quickly test"), and / or on your Master Page (which will adjust all actual pages).
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4. Re: Book Layout - Styles etc
mark_hayhurst Sep 23, 2010 1:24 AM (in response to [Jongware])All really useful stuff - I'd already been thru the Word doc originally to tidy up rogue styles etc before the import and that part seems to have gone quite smoothly. The local formatting bits still need to be done (the odd italicised word here and there).
I'm toying with whether the poems and other quotes that do not form part of the main text (she has a chapter tiotle, then a small quote and then the chapter text but interspersed on occasions are inspirational poems etc) should be in the flow of the text or pulled out into separate text boxes which the main body then flows around I guess this would give me the best options for layout adjustment. On the latter subject I pained over the margins for days trying diff options for the book size we had chosen and the font/leading that would be needed to work nicely (Minion Pro 11.5/14 on a Demi Octavo format with a GR-proportioned text frame).
It does seem a pain to have to set some of these styles manually and I'm tempted (neing a techie at heart) to look into some kind of JS process that would do the setting to make sure that the first "Normal" para had no indent and that any following ones did, and that in a bulleted list the first and last items were set accordingly - are there any useful starting templates for this sort of proc?
Mark
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5. Re: Book Layout - Styles etc
Eugene Tyson Sep 23, 2010 2:42 AM (in response to mark_hayhurst)I 1000000% agree with Jongware and his excellent posts
I've been styling books since about the year 2001. From Quark to Ventura to InDesign. To give you an idea of the scope, my laregest book is 3,200 pages. IT be wise to have a full print out from the source document at your side to refer to at all times.
To add to that here's some extra things I do to make my life easier.
Keyboard Shortcuts
I can't strees enough how assigning a KeyBoard ShortCut (KBSC) to styles is such a marvelous timesaver.
In InDesign only the Numeric Keypad can be assigned to shortcuts, it's a bit of pain. But I have a workaround that I really like.
For the Shortcuts it is always "CTRL ALT SHIFT" (CAS) followed by a number on the key pad.
CAS 0 = Chapter Heading
CAS 1 = Heading 1
CAS 2 = Heading 2
CAS 3 = Heading 3
(thereafter Heading 4 and 5 are fairly rare so no KBSC for these)
CAS 4 = Bullet 1
CAS 5 = Bullet 2
CAS 6 = Bullet 3
(thereafter Bullets 4 and 5 are fairly rare so no KBSC for these)
CAS 7 = Quotations
CAS 8 = MISC 1
CAS 9 = MISC 2
Using these I can go line by line in a chapter and assign styles very very easily, using the arrow keys to navigate to paragraphs (using CTRL and arrow key skips to next paragraph).
USING THE PRESERVE LOCAL FORMATTING:
I love this script - if this script had mileage I'd have to get it serviced about once a month!
Once I've applied all the local formatting to the text using the script. I can visually see that some headings are larger and smaller and etc. Usually I can do a Edit>Find/Change
In the Find Formatting Options I can insert the Type Size, Leading and other characteristics, e.g, bold (or Italics) etc. and the I can globally apply the styles for
Heading 1Heading 2
Heading 3
Body
Bullets*
Quotes
*Finding bullets can be difficult, I conver them all to text first using the Type>Bullets and Numbering>Convert Bulelts to text.
You then FIND the bullet characterChange FORMAT
and select the BULLET style.
After doing this the bullet is still in the text, because the Change you invoked is the "change format"So hit the trash can beside the Change Format and Change All again. Now all the Word bullets are gone and your Bullets Style is applied.
USING GREP TO APPLY STYLES
You can do additional find changes for GREP things like CHAPTER 1
One of my books requires the chapter number in the running head, but the chapter no is always followed by a full colon and text "Chapter 1: TITLE"
So a find for "Chapter\s\d+(?=:)" in the GREP and then I apply a CHARACTER STYLE to the chapter number text
This allows me to insert a Running Head variable on the master Page that only pick up on certain CHARACTER STYLES.
What's next?
Probably at this stage I'll select all the text and hit the "Override Local Formatting" this should tidy up any loose ends.
Now with my printed copy beside me, I can cycle through all the text and use my CAS to apply styles at the flick of a finger.
My biggest success story with this method (along with all the things Jongware points out)
It works great for me. I managed to create a 3,200 page book (remember I said that the start) and apply all the styles to all the text in about 3 weeks (15 days/ 90 hours / 1.6 minutes a page) with full checks. It then took a further 4 weeks to proof this book and another 4 weeks to put edits and additions to it.
So in essence, what used to take me 9 weeks to do was down to 15 working days! (not including proofing and additons, I couldn't apply KBSCs to them sadly)
InDesign really helped me achieve this. With running heads, grep find changes, keyboard shortcuts for styles, the use of Scripts to apply formatting to the text, and umpteen other things.



