by Chad Neuman

This is part 2 of 5. Be sure to download the support files and follow along from part 1.

Step One
Open the newspaperlayout.indd we created in part 1. We could place each article in and then change the font size, style, paragraph indent and justification one at a time. But we can make the process of changing these text attributes much quicker by using paragraph styles. In newspaper layouts, you want a consistent style across the publication. Creating this style ahead of time saves time when you want the various stories to be the same size and justification. Open the Paragraph Styles palette and click the New Paragraph Style at the bottom of the palette. This will create a Paragraph Style 1.

Step Two
Double-click on Paragraph Style 1 in the Paragraph Styles palette and it’ll open a dialog for the attributes of this style. Change the Style Name to body text.

Step 3
Click on Basic Character Formats. Change the font to a font you want for the body text of the articles. I chose Georgia. All the other settings look fine. From here, you could change a story to all caps, bold, and adjust other settings, but leave the settings besides the font style the same for this tutorial.

Step 4
Click on Indents and Spacing. Change the First Line Indent to 2p0. This will put a consistent indent at the first line of each paragraph. The Right Indent and Left Indent refer to the spacing if we wanted to indent the entire side of a story, such as with a long quote where it would need to be indented on both sides for the entire quote. But leave the other setting at 0p0 for this tutorial.

Step 5
Under the same Indents and Spacing menu, change the Alignment to Left Justify. What that does is slightly stretches or compresses the lines of text in the paragraph to create an aligned column of text, just like in newspapers. The Left in the Left Justify name means that the last line of text of each paragraph will be left justified, since the last line would not need to be stretched across the column width.

Step 6
Click on Character Color. It should be set to Black. For other publications, you may want to adjust this. But for this tutorial, we’ll leave it set to Black.

Step 7
Click on the General menu again, and you’ll see the Style Setting we applied: Georgia, align justified, last line left, and the first line indent to 2p0. Click OK.

Step 8
Next, we’ll need to add the style for our article titles. Click on the New Paragraph Style icon at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles palette to create a new style. It’ll be called Paragraph Style 1 by default. Double-click on it to adjust its attributes. Change the name to Titles.

Step 9
Change the “Based On” to “No Paragraph Style.” That way, we’re not basing it on any other style.

Step 10
Click on Basic Character Formats and change the Font Family to what font you’d like to use for your titles. I chose Bookman Old Style for a clean look. Change the font to a larger size that it’ll start as. I chose 36 points. For titles, we’ll adjust the sized when creating them.

Step 11
Click on Indents and Spacing. Change the First Line Indent to 0p0 so there’s no indent for the titles.

Step 12
Change the Alignment to Left instead of Left Justify. Click OK.

Step 13
In the Paragraph Styles palette, click on the New Paragraph Style icon again to create a third style, this one for the photo captions. Change the Style Name to captions and change the Based On to No Paragraph Style.

Step 14
Click on Basic Character Formats and change the Font Family to what we changed the Font family for the body text. For this example, change it to Georgia. Change the Size to 12 points and the Font Style to Italic. With publications such as newspapers, you don’t want too much font variation in order to have some consistency. Use no more than two or three fonts for the same publication.

Step 15
Click Indents and Spacing to make sure the justification is set to Left and there’s no first line indent (all indents should be set to 0p0). Click OK. Go to File>Save to save the InDesign file for use in the next tutorial. In the next tutorial in this series, we’ll start placing articles and applying these styles.