Combining multiple Character Styles

Question

I'd like to apply multiple character styles to the same words. However, this does not seem possible. One character styles always overrides the other. Please see the attached image for a visualization.
I tried Shift-clicking both styles to apply them, without success. I guess either I'm missing something quite obvious, or this is not possible?

Answer 1

Geert DD wrote:
I don't see why not? If you are a bit into webdesign, you may be familiar with CSS. Here is how you would combine multiple styles onto certain words.
.red { color:red; }
.underline { text-decoration:underline; }
<p>HTML paragraph with some <span class="red underline">red+underlined</span> text.</p>
CSS rules have a clear order of application (the "cascade"), so if there's any disagreement between rules applied to a given bit of HTML, the rule applied last "wins" by overruling any applied earlier.
Unlike CSS classes, InDesign styles are not applied in any obvious order, so if more than one style could be applied to a given bit of text, there would have to be some way of ordering them so that disagreements between them could be resolved.
The "based on" hierarchy of styles prevents style conflicts independently of any given bit of text. The ability to apply more than one style to a given bit of text would necessitate the introduction of a further ordering relation, one that applies only to the given bit of text.
That could make things very complicated, and its effects would propagate into scripting, de-bugging, and so on. It wouldn't be just InDesign that had to get it right -- the poor befuddled user would too!
Although I was kidding when I mentioned Russell's theory of types (and amused by the Peter Cook & Dudley Moore parody) I was gesturing vaguely towards the idea that there are some general/logical constraints on classification that go beyond individual applications such as InDesign.
In general, the least problematic ways of classifying things use categories that are either disjoint or else ranked in a "containment" hierarchy. This is can be seen in many areas of life. For example, an animal can be a member of species A and genus X, but it cannot be a member of both species A and species B, nor a member of both genus X and genus Y. The syntax of XML reflects all similar ways of classifying things, and that is one of the reasons why it is so powerful.
Jeremy