A

Anonymous

Answered

How do I keep my text formating when pasting from other InDesign files?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
April 24, 2012
10 replies
102420 views

I'm trying to post charts from one InDesign file to another. The chart I'm trying to paste has hand-made fractions in them. The font is superscript and baseline shifted. When I paste it into a new document, the text loses all that formatting. It seems like a preferance thing, but I can't find it.

Correct answer mina_7330

I've had this problem on and off. Read what Peter Spier said about identical named styles in both documents causing issues. So I changed the name of all my paragraph styles (just added 2024 to the end of them) and then the formatting was perfectly preserved when pasting. Thanks 🙂

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mina_7330Correct answer

Participant

I've had this problem on and off. Read what Peter Spier said about identical named styles in both documents causing issues. So I changed the name of all my paragraph styles (just added 2024 to the end of them) and then the formatting was perfectly preserved when pasting. Thanks 🙂

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Subi81

Participant

I was struggling with this this morning and read this forum. I know it's been years, but if anyone else has this problem, I think I found the solution.

I had a document from another person with their settings. When I would copy and paste into this document, it would do exactly what the OP says, it would reformat all my text.

So, here's what worked. I went to Paragraph Styles, Opened "Basic Paragraph", then clicked "No Paragraph Style" next to "Based on" and "Next Style". THEN, I clicked "Reset to Base" (the button right next to it). That's it! This worked! Now I can copy and paste text into this document without it reformatting.

CKL Digital

Participant

Worth adding this to the thread even though it is quite old. But after experiencing the same problem, I figured out the (very easy and logical) solution.

In the source document just group the character styles into a new group with a unique name, and do the same with the paragraph styles.

Then you can copy/paste the content or move the pages into another document, and any styles with the same name will not conflict, as the groups are also copied over, so they are considered separate.

Easy. Hope that helps someone out there.

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mina_7330

Participant

Actually I just tried this method too and it worked too. Thanks!

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queenfantabulous

Inspiring

I just had this problem and then I couldn't changed the text to any font and I thought I was losing my mind... until I selected it all, went to the Character style palette, click 'None' - and bang-o! my formatting was back. I am not sure why this fixed it as nothing was using a character style from the other doc... but it's a weird bug.

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TrishMeyer99

Known Participant

I was right there with you a while back. I think it's an issue because the Character Style is selected in the document that you are pasting to, from copying from. I try to check that a Character Style is not selected now when I paste.

higx13

Participant

You can load styles from other indd-document. You´ll find Load Styles commands from menus of Style Panels.

If you want to load Paragraph Styles,

1) open Paragraph Styles panel,

2) choose Load Paragraph styles (or All Text Styles) from panel menu, file choosing window opens.

3) Choose indd-file that has styles you want to load, and click OK.

4) After that you will have a list of all styles in that document, you can choose which styles you want to load at this point. When you hit OK again, you will have all the chosen styles in your current document.

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franboud

Participant

I found the solution : before pasting your text in the new document, import the styles of the first document in the new one. You can do that with "Load All Text Styles..." in the dropdown of the Paragraph Styles panel.

Formatting is 100% good now!

Prashant Bhatnagar

Participant

Havent read all of this friends (my apologies if already posted), but you could try exporting indesign snippet and then import in the target document.

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TrishMeyer99

Known Participant

Having the same issue with CS6 on Mac. I made an ad based on Basic Paragraph, and just styled each line separately since it wasn't worth making a style for each separate line.

But when I copy and paste the information into another ID document, the styles are reset to using whatever Basic Paragraph is in the destination document. This must be a bug. Surely Copy and Paste should always preserve formatting unless you do something to remove it?

The only way I've found to fix it is to click on each line in the ad and make a new style (just "ad1", "ad2" etc will work). Then when I copy and paste the lines of styled text, the formatting is pasted correctly. (So manual editing of Basic Paragraph seems to be the issue.)

Alternate: If the copy has "no style" then it also seems to copy and paste ok. So if I delete "ad1" and "ad2" etc and replace those styles with "No paragraph style" (with Preserve Formatting enabled), then when I copy this unformatted text and paste it, the formatting is intact. But there doesn't seem to be a way to select a bunch of manually edited text and say "no style", is there?

Peter Spier

Community Expert

>This must be a bug. Surely Copy and Paste should always preserve formatting unless you do something to remove it?

Quite the opposite. It's as designed and expected behavior. When moving content from one file to another, the styles in the receiving document, if named the same, ALWAYS override and control the formatting. The same thing happens with object and character styles, and with master pages if you move pages from one file to another.

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TrishMeyer99

Known Participant

Then if it's as designed, there should be a way to "preserve" the manual formatting of the pasted text. Where is this option? How does one take a block of text that has been carefully formatted and paste it into a another document - without wasting valuable time reformatting it?

If this is "as designed' then there should be a way to override this behavior. Otherwise, this is really lame behavior to not give one the choice. Both Quark and Word will assume you want to preserve the formatting. Since it's so easy to convert text back to the original style and remove manual formatting, and quite onerous to re-style the text, the onus should be on preserving the text OR allowing a "special paste" option. As I said, really lame behavior.