Shop Talk: Using Master Pages and Styles

Styles and master pages allow users of desktop publishing applications to consistently and efficiently design the appearance of type and pages.

Styles can be applied to text elements such as headers, bulleted lists, and body copy. Once assigned, styles can be redefined, so that the format of characters and paragraphs based on them will change as well. Master pages also work in much the same way. After a master page is modified, the appearance of its child page changes too. These result in a consistent look for all text and pages.

Master pages and styles also offer the added bonus of smaller files sizes. You can, for instance, place a watermarked background image on a master page, and you would no longer have to add that image to each page individually. Then, the image will appear in all the pages based on that master page. You can also define styles so that you would not need to repeatedly define the character and paragraph attributes of your text.