From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

Work with character styles - Publisher Tutorial

From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

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Work with character styles

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Let's take a look at how to use character styles in Affinity Publisher. Here on my document, I'm going to zoom in on the photo caption on the right page. And what I need to do here is change the formatting of the label that identifies the position of the photo, where it says "Top Left". I could just highlight those words, and use the settings in the Context toolbar to make the font bold, all caps, and a different color, but that wouldn't be very efficient, since obviously I'm going to have more photos with captions, and I don't want to have to manually apply that formatting every time. So, instead, I'll go to the Text Styles panel and click the button to create a new character style. I'll call it "Caption Label", and notice since we're dealing with a style that only applies character-level formatting, there are no paragraph level controls to set here. So things like spacing, hyphenation and justification, tabs, bullets and numbering are not available in a character style. But we can control things like Font, Color and Decorations, Character Positioning, which includes things like Kerning and Tracking, Scaling and No Break, which can be used to keep words together on the same line, and so on. For my "Caption Label" style, I want to apply Bold, so I'll go to Font, choose Font Weight, Bold. I'll also make sure to turn off Italic, so this character style will remove any italics applied to text. And in Color and Decorations, I'll set the Text Fill to use my brown swatch. In Capitals, I'll apply All Caps, and click OK. Now, to apply my character style, I'll select the text of the Caption Label through the colon, and choose the style from the panel. If I place my cursor in the label text, notice that the Text Styles panel highlights both the paragraph style and the caption style that are applied to this text. Now, I'll show you an even more efficient way to apply this character style. First, I'll select the label text and remove the character style by clicking No Character Style in the panel. And then I'll go to the menu for the Paragraph Style and choose Edit, and in the settings, I'll choose Initial Words. Here, I can tell Publisher to automatically apply a character style to the first words in a paragraph, which is perfect for my caption labels. I'll click to enable initial words, I'll set the max word count to 2, since I know that's the most my label will ever have. End Characters tells Publisher to immediately stop applying the character style. I know that will always be a colon, so I'll just enter that, and I'll choose my character style, and finally make sure Apply Style to Selection is turned on. And now, anytime I apply this paragraph style, my Label character style will automatically be applied to up to the first two words followed by a colon. And since we specified the colon as the end character, my style also works if I only want a single word formatted, like "Below". If I delete the colon, then the style is applied to the word limit, which is two. I'll change it back to say "Top Left". So here, we saw how to create and apply character styles, including how to apply them automatically within a paragraph style using the Initial Words feature in Affinity Publisher.

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