Basic question about Paragraph Styles

To apply a Paragraph Style and remove overrides hold the ALT/OPTION Key when you apply the style.

Honest answer: this would be a good place for a tutorial that covers all the basics.

The short answer is that InDesign will apply styles and try to preserve certain overrides that might be applied. For example, if you have a paragraph with one word italicized (using either a spot override, which is bad, or a character style, which is the right method) it will apply the style to everything but NOT remove that override.

If the overrides are applied using spot methods (select-and-apply something like italics, bold, another font, etc.) the para style will then show a + to show that the paragraph has been changed to that style, but overrides still exist. (If the override is a defined character style, it will not usually show a + flag.)

So the basic method is to just put the cursor in a paragraph and click the style, which will be applied to the whole paragraph. It's better not to select all the text, because that does not increase the way ID applies the style, but can cause other formatting faults.

If you click in a paragraph, apply the new style, and the style name grows a +, you can either clean up the formatting by (say) applying a Bold character style where a spot override was used, or completely clear all overrides with one of several right-click options. (Right-click on the applied style name in the list to see.) Experiment with those to see what they all do on various paragraphs.

If it's not clear from that, ALL text in ID should have nothing but specific styles (paragraph or character) applied. Never use spot formatting, as is so common in apps like Word. Get rid of such spot formatting whenever you encounter it.

A tutorial will make this all much clearer and fill in the gaps. 🙂

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