Character Styles

Character styles complement paragraph styles and are applied to groups of characters, rather than whole paragraphs. They are mainly used when you want to change the appearance or attributes of parts of a paragraph without affecting other parts. Examples of effects that can be obtained by means of character styles are bold or italic typeface or colored words.

Why use character styles?

New Writer users often wonder what is the point in using character styles when they can just apply direct formating, for example bold characters. The following real-life event illustrates the difference.

Let's say for example that, you are editing a technical book than contains dozens terms highlighted using yellow color. Then your boss comes and says that he does not like the color and you must change it to light blue. Now you have to spend the next hour making all the changes. If you have used character styles you would simply modify the style in just a second.

Applying and modifying character styles

To apply a predefined character style use the Styles and Formatting Window from the Sidebar.

First select the text (not the paragraph)

and then apply one of the available styles.

Creating a custom character style.

To create a custom character style:

1. Select and format your text and
2. Drag the text to the Styles and Formatting window and give it a name. Alternatively you can use the create style from selection button.