Paragraph Styles Problem
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- This topic has 15 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 5 months ago by
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Sometimes paragraph styles work great for me. Other times, they only apply some of the characteristics of the selected style.
For example, I just pasted some text into ID that had Geneva 14pt font. I selected it and clicked my paragraph font (Minion Pro, 11pt, italics). When I did that, the font background turned pink, because it tried to italicize it without changing the font, and Geneva does’t have italics. Other times, it will change the font to italics, but won’t change the font size.
When this happens, the style always has a + next to it.
What am I doing wrong? Thanks!
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There are a couple of options to avoid that, but it would mean that any other local formatting would be lost.
1) With the paragraph selected (anywhere in the text) hold down the option key when clicking on the style sheet. That overrides any other formating and it will come in as the right font and size.
2) Go to your ID preferences and go to the pasteboard preferences. Select text only. That way, when you copy and paste it will be text only with no formatting, and then you can make it the style sheet you want.
I’m guessing you are copying and pasting from a Word file?
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Ok, thanks! I’m actually pasting from Scrivener.
I still don’t understand though why clicking the paragraph style doesn’t affect the font characteristics. Isn’t that the purpose of the styles? To change the font to that style?
Thanks!
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It’s supposed to, but if there are local formatting, it doesn’t like it.
For example, I’ve received Word files with inserts I need to put into the pages. Many times, the Word paragraph style is just normal and they changed the point size by font by hand. Well, InDesign will apply the paragraph style, but it doesn’t override those local formats.
So when you hold down the option key and click the paragraph style sheet, that tells InDesign to get rid of those local fomatting.
I hope that makes sense.
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Gotcha. Okay, that’s very helpful. Thank you!
If I choose “text only” under clipboard options, that means it won’t even import numbered lists, etc., right?
Assuming that’s the case, I”m trying to decide the best way to bring text in. Do I just need to make sure everything is formatted in Word (or whatever application) using styles?
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Yes–plain text is just plain text. No formatting.
If I’m just copying and pasting a few lines or a paragraph, I just copy and paste into ID and clear the overrides, and apply the appropriate style sheets.
If it’s a large file, I run macros to capture italic, bold, etc., and tag the file with the InDesign codes. I then save it as a .txt file and import it that way.
Other folks like to import the word file as is, but that would entail making sure that the paragraph style sheets in InDesign and Word are named the the same.
Hopefully others will chime in with their ideas.
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@dwayne – Just wondering, how do you tag the file with indesign code? IS is really needed? I’ve set up a number of char styles in Indesign in all the templates we use. With our macro in Word, we create char styles in Word which match (the name) with CC.
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Gert
Actually–we use XTags. I work mainly with books, and many times we have to have the manuscript re-keyed because it’s so heavily edited or a Word file is not available, so we mark it up with Quark codes as InDesigns tags are very lengthy.
Sometimes, we get a completely clean word file from the customer and they have tagged it with their own coding system (such as <TX> for regular text, <CT> for chapter opener, etc. We then just search and replace on those and put in the Quark coding. For those, we search for < and replace with the @ symbol. And the > and replace with the : symbol. And that gives us our Quark coding (i.e., @TX: @CT: , etc. Much shorter than ID’s naming convention.
We use Quark coding mainly because the tags are shorter, and XTags converts all Quark coding to InDesign coding.
If the manuscript is being rekeyed, our keyboarders key in the italic, bold, etc. codes, and the Quark codes (paragraph styles).
If it’s a clean word file, once I search & replace on the codes, I have a macro that captures italic, bold, small caps, superiors, etc. And it fixes things like spaced ellipses, spaced single and double quote combinations, removing double spaces, double paragraph returns, spaces at the beginning of a line, etc.
Then, whether we had it keyboarded or used the “clean file,” we save it as a .txt file, and run a second macro that does a few more things. And then we import it with XTags.
At one time I attempted a macro for something similar to you work flow, but nine times out of ten, the Word files we get weren’t done with paragraph formatting or character formatting. Everything is pretty much plain and styled by hand in Word.
And all of our books are different. While we use the same paragraph style sheet names and character style sheet names for all the books we do, we don’t have any templates. Every book is totally different.
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Dwayne, thanks. I’m always looking for possibilities to make our workflow better and faster, hence the question. Xtags isn’t really an option for us, and indeed, the CC tagging is too complicated to be fast. We used Pagemaker in the “good old days” and used a lot of it’s tagging. We now only use the word macro or the preptext script. Thnks for the reply.
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You’re welcome, Gert.
We originally got XTags back in the Quark days (Quark 4) and when we were using autopage.
Then later on, we starting doing InDesign jobs while also doing Quark jobs. And it was easier to just tag them all the same way, as xags converts to ID coding when importing into Indesign.
And nowadays, though we’re 99 percent InDesign, we are so used to coding and using it, then it’s a time-saver for us. And sometimes the client wants a tagged text file that they can import into InDesign. For those, we tag as Quark, import into InDesign via xTags, and export as a tagged InDesign file.
It’s very useful for us.
I never used pagemaker (except for doing corrections on a job a client had sent us), but had to use Framemaker a few times for one job (I had to teach myself how to use it).
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The “+” means your paragraph style was applied but either includes local character styles or local overrides, and therefore your paragraph is maintaining those local styles.
If you right-click on the paragraph style and choose ‘Apply “Paragraph Style”, Clear Character Style’ it removes local styles such as bold text, underlines, italics.
If you right-click on the paragraph style and choose ‘Apply “Paragraph Style”, Clear Overrides’ it removes items such as formatted fractions, etc.
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A solution I foound to override paragraph styles without clearing local formatting like italics and bolds: you go to characters style panel, here you erase every character style. A pop up window will ask you if you want to preserve local formatting. You say “yes” and you erase the character styles. After that, when you’ll apply paragraph styles you’ll obtain your hopefull results without losing italics and bolds.
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I’m sorry, Monica, but that makes no sense to me. People use character styles to avoid losing those attributes.
Most of the time, the paragraph will keep local formatting (i.e., italic, bold, etc.) that isn’t a character style. But it will always keep that formatting if a character style is used.
The issue is that sometimes one needs to clear all formatting to a paragraph style to work properly. That is when you hold down the option key and click the paragraph style sheet name.
If you don’t have character styles applied, then any italic, bold, etc., local formatting (i.e., without character styles applied) will be lost.
The only thing you did was delete the character styles and said that whatever they were applied to will remain (i.e. italic, bold, etc.).
But I can guarantee that if you hold down the option key and click the paragraph style sheet name to clear overrides, all your italic and bold will disappear.
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My problem is a bit different, but in the same family.
I’m working from a file that was created by a different company.
I apply a paragraph style that is 40pt type. All attributes change properly except for the size, which changes to 36. The style sheet does NOT have a + after it.
I tried this with several style sheets in this file and the same thing happens.
Can anyone help?
If you suggest creating a new file, that’s my last resort. It’ll be quite a job. -
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