The lack of this feature has already led to hard-to-catch text formatting errors in documents my organization has published.

Please add this! There's nothing more to be said that hasn't already! :]

I'm leaving a comment to add to the update requests of the other users.

While no app can replace InDesign for my current needs, the fact that a lot of software has implemented this kind of function makes me hope Adobe takes it seriously. It would be an extremely beneficial function.

Please let us know if any development had been done towards this since 2018.

Is there any update on this? It would greatly simplify a lot of currently troublesome manual formatting for nobreak, superscript, bold, etc. Thanks!

I use Character Styles to "tighten" text to get text to not roll onto the next frame/page. I usually have 3 levels of squeezing, always trying to use the least dramatic shift for cosmetic reasons. However, any other character styles in that paragraph get wiped out. So being able to preserve character styles when i'm using another character style to tighten text would be fantastic. Let's go Adobe! Make this one happen.

This feature could greatly reduce the number of character styles needed to format a document, but it could also be useful for running headers based on character styles in case you need to “mark” only part (or parts) of a document headline paragraph to be used in a running header if that source paragraph already contains words with other character styles used (for example, words in italics or bold). This case could be better solved with other kind of text tagging than using character styles, but if there is no better option yet, multiple character styles applied to text could help with running headers too.

Being a top 10 requested feature on InDesign's UserVoice whose last update is dating back to 2018, would we be able to have an update on any development?

I think I am speaking for a lot of users who are working with the current tools out of a lack of alternatives rather than considering them to be perfect in their current state.

I feel like a lot of recent implementations (auto styles come to mind) are trying to implement new features while the actual functions are severly lacking.

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.