Tip of the Week: Duplicating Styles

This tip was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on December 18, 2014.

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The ability to base styles on one another is one of the most powerful and important features in InDesign. However, there are times when you’ll want to use one style as the starting point for another, without making the new style based on the existing style. That way, the attributes of new style won’t change no matter how you change the existing style.

To do this, use the Duplicate Style feature: right-click on a style in the panel and choose Duplicate Style (or click on a style and choose Duplicate Style from the panel menu).

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Your new style will start off with all the formatting of the existing style, but it will not be based on that style. Instead, it will be based on No Paragraph Style or whatever style the existing style was based on.

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Michael W. Perry says:

December 23, 2014 at 8:04 am

The flip side of that tip is to deliberately use “based on.”

For instance, suppose you want all the variations of body text to use the same but still-undecided font. Create a Body_Font style that only defines the font and base every body font on either that style or a style based on it. When the font decision is made, simply change the font in Body_Font, and all the others change with it.

One of the things I like about Adobe is that when they implement a feature, they almost always make it smooth, effective and powerful. This aspect of paragraph styles illustrates that.