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craigs98097117
craigs98097117
Participating Frequently
November 24, 2025
Question

Indesign - apply specific paragraph styles without altering character formatting?

  • November 24, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 182 views

I have a very large book to complete - and to avoid a lot of very detail re-formatting i want to import the formatted text then have a paragraph style which only changes specific paragraph style things without altering the all the other formatting... i cant seem to do this! can someone exaplin what im doing wrong?

 

Example - the text is pre-formatted to times new roman, with various words bold, italic, bold italic, there are end-notes in superscript, dates with superscript 'th' etc lots of detailed formatting already present.

 

I can create a character style and leave all the formatting options blank except for perhaps the point size and use that to change the entire texts point size no problem... 

 

but if (for example) i want to create a paragraph style so i can select parts of the text that are quotes and indent it left/right, but change nothing else... i cant? as in the paragraph styles box i have to specify 'basic character formats' and cannot leave it blank. so when i use this paragraph style to indent it then it also removes lots of formatting i don't want it to? 

1 reply

BobLevine
Community Expert
BobLevineCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 24, 2025

You can do this with nested or grep styles, I suppose, but the purpose of paragraph styles is to style an entire paragraph. For just pieces, use character styles. Honestly, from your description, I think you might have this the wrong way around.

 

Are you aware that if you use paragraph and character styles properly in Word, when you place the DOCX file, you can map those styles to InDesign styles and be very much on your way?

craigs98097117
craigs98097117Author
Participating Frequently
November 24, 2025

I'm not sure i do, but if you can elaborate - perhaps i do? I mean what I want to do is simple so im hoping theres something simple im missing:

 

I want to select an entire paragraph that is a quote, hit my paragraph style (or other setting if theres a better way to do it) and it will automatically format the following:

left indent 8pt, right indent 8pt, point size 10 pt, fully justified - but importantly change nothing else! none of the other formatting like if theres a bold italic name or something... 

 

hwne i try to set this up as a paragraph style at the moment i cant seem to do this, as it forces me to include a specific chacracter style within the paragraph style which then overrides any other formatting that is present and ruins it

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