Nested Paragraph Style Question

[Kenny_Hoff@adobeforums.com]

Hi, the manual is pretty vague about some of the specifics of handling nested paragraph styles.

I'm seeing if they will help me in a catalog. I have lines that need the first couple words up to a colon to use a character style that applies bold styling.

I setup the style and it appears correct, but my question is:

- Should I be able to see that a character style has been applied when selecting the portion of text that the nested style is applying it to (in the Character Styles Palette)?

Currently, when I select the text that is now bold, it shows up as having no character style. I would have expected it to show me the style that the nested paragraph style is applying.

I'm just worried about this being confusing if someone checks it out that doesn't know to search in the paragraph style to see if there is any nested style being used. It's just not very obvious.

Am I missing something??

Thanks!

[Bob Levine]

No, it wouldn't show up in the character style palette. A character
style overrides a paragraph style. Since the formatting is already being
applied as part of the paragraph style you wouldn't see the character
style as being applied.

Bob

[Kenny_Hoff@adobeforums.com]

Hmmm, thanks. I guess I was thinking it was actually applying the character style automatically. I have to weigh the advantages in quick formatting against the difficutly in deciphering this in the future (we do this every few months, and different people may work on it.). I don't like to style things in ways that aren't very obvious (even to me - poor memory : (

__________________

So while we're on the subject of nested paragraph styles, can I get an opinon about the best way to tackle this situation...

My lines are 99% of the time as follows:
[First Name] [Last Name], [Title - Phd, MA, MEd, etc.], biography text....

I need up to the comma after the title to have the bold character style. So I setup the nested paragraph style to apply the bold character style up to 2 commas.

But 1% of the time it may be as follows:
[First Name] [Last Name], [Title] biography text...

In this case there is no 2nd comma.

- Any more foolproof way to apply the nested style so that I don't have to carefully catch the 1% of lines without the 2nd comma??

THANKS AGAIN!!

[Dave_Saunders@adobeforums.com]

Actually, the name of the nested character style does appear in the Character Styles palette in the area at the bottom left of the palette. The reason it's down there is because you could have two character styles at the same time and this allows the directly applied one to be highlighted while the nested style name is still shown.

As to your commas question, that's a toughy. You're going to have to do something at some point to pick out those cases. Given the circumstances, finding them by a search/replace is going to be just as difficult, so I'm not sure what to suggest. If you could arrange for a fixed space to precede the biography in all cases, you could key off that rather than the commas.

Dave

[Kenny_Hoff@adobeforums.com]

Wow, good eye on the character styles palette! I don't think I would have ever caught that. Maybe that will be enough to justify the possible future confusion.

Thanks again for the help!

[Bob Levine]

Thanks, Dave.

I completely forgot about that.

Bob