Create and edit text styles

Last updated on Jun 2, 2026

Learn how to use Character and Paragraph styles in Adobe InDesign to apply consistent formatting and load styles from other documents.

Character and Paragraph Styles (also called Text styles) maintain consistency throughout your document. A character style is a collection of character formatting attributes that you can apply to a selected range of text, while paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes. You can apply it to a selected paragraph or a range of paragraphs.

Create a new Character style

Select text that contains the formatting you want to save as a style.

Select Window > Styles > Character Styles.

Select the Create new style icon at the bottom-right of the panel to create a style with the selected text formatting.

Create a new Paragraph style

Select text that contains the formatting you want to save as a style.

Select Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles.

Select Create new style icon at the bottom-right of the panel to create a style with the selected text formatting.

Edit Styles

You can change the format of the default or new Character or Paragraph style using the respective panels.

Select Window > Styles > Character Styles or select Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles.

Select the style you want to modify from the list provided.

Select the panel menu icon, then select Style Options.

Select and adjust the formatting attributes within the Character Style Options or Paragraph Style Options dialog box.

Select OK.

Load styles from another document

Open the Character Styles or Paragraph Styles panel (Type > Character Styles or Paragraph Styles).

Choose an option:

Select the Character Styles panel menu icon, then select Load Character Styles or Load All Text Styles.
Select the Paragraph Styles panel menu icon, then select Load Paragraph Styles or Load All Text Styles.

Select the InDesign or InCopy file within Open a File dialog box and select Open.

Select the boxes next to the styles you want to import in the Load Styles dialog box.

Select an option under Conflict with Existing Style, if any existing style has the same name as one of the imported styles:

Use Incoming Definition: Overrides the existing style with the imported style.
Auto-Rename: Renames the imported style.

Adobe InDesign Load Styles dialog showing the Basic Paragraph style selected, with Use Incoming Definition chosen to resolve a style conflict. — Select Check All instead of manually selecting each style to import all the styles within the document.

Select OK.

Note

To share styles across multiple documents in a publication, use the Books feature with style synchronization. For Word document styles, learn about mapping Word styles to InDesign styles.

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