Caption style setup disobeying style I specified!

Good morning, Martha!

I have some questions about these disobedient captions, and while I have drawn a conclusion, I'd like to review this with you.

I can see that you set up automatic captions to assign your Figure caption style. However, you also defined it to pull in the page number. Which it will, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you want. 

On the bright side, it is doing exactly as you asked. When I generate a caption, I get the page number and the style is assigned correctly. 

I'm guessing there is some confusion as to when to use a generated caption. When photos are provided with metadata included—professional photographers do this regularly—we can generate a caption using the metadata. For example, a photographer might load a template into all of their photos that includes of their contact information, and we can generate a photo credit by pulling in the Creator name from the metadata. This allows the photographer to control the text, and we can grab that information from the photo and format it automatically. If something changes in the metadata, a live caption will update itself to reflect the updates. It's a cool system. However, I can't find any evidence of any metadata in the images I've reviewed. 

So... my working theory is that you are trying to automate the style application, but don't actually need to use generated captions at all. Instead, we should focus on this line :"the style for captions of photos/objects should be "figure caption style," which I specified to be 9/10.38 Corda Light Italic. Instead, the resulting caption text is 18/18 Corda Medium." 

Your style is correctly defined as 9/10.38 Corda Light Italic.

When you see a + next to a style name, that indicates an override. To remove an override, you can right-click a style with an override, and restore the original definition by clicking Apply Figure Caption Style & Clear Overrides. Some of your captions have paragraph overrides and some have character overrides—it's a mixed bag and that is the issue. To standardize... I would start by removing all overrides/character styles from the captions and re-assign the formatting using styles. (I added two in my demo: one for the bold numbers and another one for the captions that have text that isn't italics but only had time to show one.)

If you want, we can further automate this, but first you want to get everything cleaned up so that it doesn't feel like InDesign is working against you.

~Barb

Hard to know what is going wrong here - if it's not working as expected - ensure you have the style setup correctly and applied correctly.

What I can do is predict the behaviour - if you have accidentally selected a Character Style in the Panel - the caption will generate - and the actual style applied via paragraph style will in fact also inherit the Caharacter Style.

Character styles tend to override paragraph style settings.

When you make sure the Character Style is set to None

And then generate the caption - it only inherits the Paragraph Style - as Character Style is set to None

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In InDesign - whatever you have selected in the panels can become the default for all new things created.

For example, you could select a Paragraph Style in the Panel and then for every new Text Frame this will be the text style for that Frame.

Barb's answer is the right one to lead you to a solution for the problem you're experiencing, but an aside, if I may: InDesign's caption system is useful only (or at least substantially) to those working in a managed environment where every image is prepared for a library with complete, edited metadata including a generic caption. The only examples I can think of are commercial magazines and most catalog shops.

While this might be exactly the right workflow for you, if your productions are largely one-off, with little reuse of photos and no need to have comprehensive information embedded/assigned to each image (as would be useful in a commercial shop where designers and layout have to rely on that info as provided by the photographer/art department) — if you know what the photos are and can write captions on the fly as part of the layout and so forth, it may be pointless and excess effort to load all the info into metadata just to use the auto-caption feature.

Just because a feature exists doesn't mean you have to use it. ID's caption feature overall is not very good, outside of that very rigid, managed model, and most small shops and individuals are better off just manually laying in captions. For one thing, you won't have problems getting the right styles applied by the robo-helper. 🙂

I would expect this is an issue with the style definition and not with the captions feature. What happens if you click on a generated caption with the Type tool, and then click on the style name to assign it manually? Does it change or does it stay the same? Does it indicate any overrides?

~Barb