Paragraph and character styles tips

The Typefi team has some tips and tricks for creating paragraph and character styles in your Typefi-ready template.

General tips

• Use the same style naming convention for all your templates.
• Name content styles semantically, then add formatting information to variations. For example:
  • List_Numbered
    List_Numbered_First
  • CT
    CT_nospace
• Name styles "big to small," like Head_A rather than A_Head. Styles of the same type will sort together alphabetically in style palettes.
• Be meticulous about capitalisation, especially if the workflow uses Typefi Writer to author content—default style names in Microsoft Word cannot be changed, so the template must adapt to the Word capitalisation, not the other way around.
• Set the [Basic Paragraph] style like your body text style. Typefi will apply this style with a red character colour if a paragraph style is used but not defined in the InDesign template. However, you can customise this too.
• Don’t base any other styles on [Basic Paragraph].
• Don't use colon characters in your style names.
• It's OK to create "base" styles and base other styles with similar formatting on them.
• It's OK to use Style Groups.
• It's OK to set up nested and GREP styles. (For a fantastic introduction to GREP, see Peter Kahrel's article in InDesign Magazine).
• Use Keep Options.

~ Template only style group

Some paragraph or character styles are used for running headers, page numbers, boilerplate copy, or other text that appears on the page, but wouldn’t be written by an author or editor in their authoring tool. Use a ~Template Only style group to keep these styles separate from actual content styles. Use the tilde (~) in the name, so the style group folder sorts at the top of the style list.

Set up ~Template Only paragraph and character style groups in your template, and copy any style you don’t think an author would use.

Export to Template XML

You can control which styles are visible to authors in Microsoft Word by enabling or disabling the Export to Template XML option:

1. With nothing else selected, click on either a style or style group to highlight it.
2. Then, right-click (control-click for macOS) and choose Export to Template XML from the pop-up menu. A checkmark next to Export to Template XML means the style will be visible in Word. Choosing Export to Template XML will toggle the checkmark on and off.

By default, all styles will show in Word. If you’d like to prevent them from appearing in Word, choose Export to Template XML on the style or style group and make sure the checkmark is not visible. The selection for a style group applies to all styles in that group.