Adobe InDesign - Manual (Page 386)

Create nested styles
You can specify character-level formatting for one or more ranges of text within a paragraph or line. You can also set up two or more nested styles
to work together, one taking over where the previous one ends. For paragraphs with repetitive and predictable formatting, you can even loop back
to the first style in the sequence.
Nested styles are especially useful for run-in headings. For example, you can apply one character style to the first letter in a paragraph and
another character style that takes effect through the first colon (:). For each nested style, you can define a character that ends the style, such as a
tab character or the end of a word.
In this example, the Number character style formats the first word, and the Run-in character style formats text through the first colon.
Michael Murphy provides an article on nested styles at InDesign's Nested Styles Auto-Format Multiple Paragraphs . He also provides a series of
video tutorials that starts at Nested Style Sheets .
Create one or more nested styles
1. Create one or more character styles that you want to use to format text.
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