When Applying a Paragraph Style Has No Effect

David Blatner

17

Have you ever selected some text and then applied a paragraph style and nothing happens? Or some aspects of the text change, but the paragraph style was not fully applied? This is unfortunately a common problem in InDesign, but there’s usually a simple answer: character styles.

If you click on a paragraph style and nothing changes, here’s what you should do:

First, you should make sure there’s no “local formatting” sitting on top of the text. If you use the Type tool to click inside one of the problem paragraphs, and you see a + symbol next to the paragraph style name in the Paragraph Styles panel, then there is local formatting. You can get rid of it by clicking the Remove Overrides button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. (That’s the button that looks like a ¶ symbol accompanied by a + with a line through it.) That removes all local formatting, including italic and bold and so on.

If there’s no + symbol next to the paragraph style name, and the text still doesn’t look like it should (doesn’t look like the paragraph style definition), then there’s probably a character style applied to it. With some of the text selected, open the Character Styles panel. If anything other than None is selected, then you probably want to select all the text and click None to remove the character style. That generally fixes the problem.

(You should never have a character style applied to all the text in a paragraph.)

Now, here’s where it gets interesting… sometimes you’ll find text that has a character style applied to it, but the panel still highlights “None” — as though there were no style applied! For example, the body text in this document should be black and not-italic. Something is wrong!

As you can see above, there’s no local formatting applied to the text. And as you can see below, there doesn’t appear to be any character style applied… that is, [None] is selected:

But the panel is lying to you! Look above at the bottom of the Character Styles panel, to the left of the folder icon. That word “¶emphasis” means that the emphasis character style is being applied as part of the paragraph style! That is, something inside the paragraph style is applying the character style for you.

So I’ll go back to the Paragraph Styles panel, and edit the style by double-clicking on the style name… and I’ll click through the list on the left until I find the culprit. In this case, it’s a nested style:

You can see above that the emphasis style is being applied from the beginning of the paragraph all the way until the first instance of the character “&” — and, in this case, that character never shows up, so it just applies the character style to the entire paragraph!

If I delete that nested style, the formatting goes away:

There are several features inside the paragraph style definition that can cause this: nested styles, grep styles, line styles… check each of those carefully.