InDesign Secrets Video: Converting Local Formatting to Styles

If somewhere on this Earth there existed a stone tablet on which were carved the Ten Commandments of InDesign, you can bet your bottom dollar that the words “Thou Shalt Not Commit Local Overrides” would be at the top of the list. Having a cleanly styled document has many benefits, regardless if your document is destined for print or digital publishing. But how do you go about finding and fixing local overrides? Sure you could go page by page, clicking in each bit of suspicious formatting and checking for the notorious little + signs in the Control panel or styles panels. But there’s a much faster and easier way to reveal them at a glance. And in the latest InDesign Secrets video at lynda.com, Anne-Marie Concepcion shows exactly how to do that, using a custom preflight profile. It’s so simple and so effective. Genius!

But it’s not enough just to find local overrides, you have to fix them too, by replacing them all with cleanly applied styles, which Anne-Marie also demonstrates. Check it out in the InDesign Secrets video series at lynda.com.

Then with your styling sins absolved, you can start working on the other Commandments, like Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wacom.