Creating Character Styles

What Are Character Styles?

Character styles are text presets that make it easy to apply consistent formatting to frequently used text elements like headlines, quotes, body copy, and captions.

Character styles streamline your workflow, and they are also needed for eDesign tools like portrait flow. See the Portrait Flow PDF Guide and video tutorials for more information.

Creating and Editing a Character Style

• Log in as an adviser or editor → Settings → Character Styles.
• A few sample styles come preloaded into eDesign.
  • Edit an existing style: select style → Edit → adjust settings → Save
  • Create a new style: click Add → name it → customize settings → Save

• For each style, set:
  • Name — descriptive label (e.g., “Body Copy”, “Caption”)
  • Font, Size, and Color — choose from the list of all your activated fonts and colors
  • Line Height/Leading — space vertically between lines of text
  • Tracking — space between characters
  • Capitalization Styles — defaults to no style applied
• Click Apply when done.

In this panel, you can also set one style to be your default style when designing. See the Default Character Style tutorial for more information on this option.

Applying Character Styles in Page Design

1. Select the text on the page
2. Select the T tool in the side bar (if not done automatically)
3. Click the “select style” drop down menu in the top left
4. Select a style from the list

A Manage Character Styles option will appear on the drop down list. Click this link to edit or add a style. It will open the character styles settings in a new tab.