...it's a good question sam...
...paragraph styles and character styles are no doubt extremely useful, as too are nested styles. As ever with these features they require an element of planning when used in a brochure and they no doubt play a big role in large document use that require consistency across many pages...
...for most work i tend to use local formatting first, getting the structure as i need and then creating styles later. For large brochure work it can help to first get sample pages approved before doing the whole lot. That is where styles do help because you can play around with the styles fonts and change a whole set of sample pages easily...
...i think typesetting is quite a big and important area in design and can sometimes be harder than many people realise, even with todays technology at our finger tips, getting content to fit can still be a challenge...
...i do believe it is good practice to make use of styles in situations where you know you need consistent text appearance throughout the underlying structure of a document. Certainly do use them for the basic and most common elements such as main headings, sub headings, body copy, page numbers at the very least...
...it does come down to what sort of documents you are building i think...
...sometimes i find myself wishing i had used styles when i hadn't, so it is good practice to keep using them...
...if your dealing with documents that require things like ad setting, then they will no doubt all require custom fitting most likely, so for those i would just use local formatting...
...many will tell you to always use styles, but i don't believe they are always necessary for every document you ever create...
...known documents you know come around again and again definitely benefit from style use. But using them on every single element inside a document is open for debate, but i would certainly use them for the basic backbone structure at the very least...
andrew
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