Here's another example I'm running into today: often we need to apply the character format "NO BREAK" to a couple words to keep them together on the same line. But if we make "NO BREAK" a character style, that becomes the ONLY style we can apply to those words. If the words were previously assigned a character style like BOLD/ITALIC/SUPERSCRIPT or whatever, and we then apply NO BREAK, we wipe out their previous formatting. It's silly and a huge time-waster. All styles should be stackable.

How is the 5-year exploration process going? Really need this one to evolve. Hopping back and forth between web projects that use CSS, and going back in Indesign—where each character/paragraph can only have ONE single style applied to it, is like stepping into the dark ages. As an Indesign user for 23 years, this is the single most important feature request I can think of. While some people might not know or realize they need this, once it is added everyone will wonder how they lived without it.

So... while it was fun hopping in the way-back machine to visit a post last updated in 2018... It's been almost 5 years. Is that "Soon" in Adobe Dev land? (Asking for a friend from 2023...)

Thanks, this is very very important for us.

Please! Please provide this! My life would be soooo much easier with this!

ADOBE, please removed the many SPAM posts in this thread. They've been flagged.

AND, any update on this feature that was proposed nearly 5 years ago?

@anonym:

Yes, the spam is annoying. But the Adobe team members should use their limited time better and implement this long desired feature instead. Pleeease!

ADOBE: this thread has been compromised with unrelated spam, begins with this entry:
John White commented · June 29, 2021 7:27 AM · Flagged

Please remove the junk spam posts.

Soon? How soon is "soon" in Adobe's response on December 7, 2018?
I guess time is relative!

I am waiting for this for years now.

We have very big documents in our agency with
- multiple languages
- multiple font styles
- multiple color styles
- multiple GREP Styles
in one document.

That leads to about 20 paragraph styles and 20 character styles in one document.

With this feature we would only need 5 paragraph styles and 10 character styles. Sounds weird but thats the case. We struggle with this all along.

Like Even said before: "It should work exactly like CSS — we can have a paragraph with multiple classes applied, and whenever a conflict exists, the most-recently-applied style overrides the others."

Did a really quick mock-up how an Appearance panel might look in InDesign for applying multiple character styles to characters.

I see this has been around for almost 2 years.
It would really be a great feature/ability.
Here's hoping it gets some attention.

Very useful idea. I often need Superscript+Italic or Bold+Underline or Italic+NoBreak.
I also use Character Styles to define the text for Headers and Footers, but I cannot use Header+Italic.

Please Please Please incorporate this feature!

Totally agree with this proposition! As there may be a character style for "no break" and "italic" and "underline" and even "color," would be so much easier to apply each as fit rather than having to pick which one to apply and which ones to have to format manually.

I agree this would be very useful in some circumstances.
However, Character styles are picked up by auto-generated TOCs whether you want it or not. GREP styles aren't. The GREP style can be triggered by an invisible non joiner character inserted in front of the word. With GREP styles you can apply several character styles to the same word, I haven't tested the limits of how many before you run into trouble… GREP styles are applied in the order they are listed under "GREP styles" in a paragraph style. (I found a lot of useful information on this at indesignsecrets)

Hey! Moderators! Are you blind? Kill all this spamer animals here in the comments

Just ran into a situation where I wanted a heading to have a character style that's picked up by a header and highlight it in yellow and found out it can't be both. Sigh. Agree this would be a great improvement.

Phantom, as I wrote in my feature request: There should be an »appearance« panel, as you have in Illustrator, which shows the hierarchy of the applied styles. The higher style wins.

Quite simple, actually. Have conflicts in character styles apply in order of application (e.g., if cs1 applies bold and cs2 applies semibold, bold will apply, given that cs1 is higher priority) and have a warning symbol appear when such conflicts exist, akin to overridden styles., with a contextual option to remove overridden styles.