Quad-click paste removes paragraph style in InDesign

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
November 6, 2025
2 replies
288 views

As part of my work I do allot of text replacements inside indesign documents for tranlation purposes. I open a tranlated ms-word document and copy - paste it into indesign. Doing this I need to be really carefull not end up with the paragraph style of a neighboring paragraph when pasting. Even using the ugly story editor does not fixe this issue. Only click-drag selecting making sure not to include the paragraph marker does. This is such a waste of time. Should developers fix this? I wish they would make quad-click paste hassle-free in indesign.

Type

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Not saying you are wrong here, but curious what your setting in prefs is for Clipboard Handling when pasting text. Is it alll information, or text only? Is the the text tagged with the corect style in Word?

I

Ibo VisAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Peter,

Text only. In word when I paste unformatted text into lets say a styled header paragraph, the pasted text adopts the applied paragraph style. Even when paragraph marker was selected.

I'd hate to compare MS-Word to InDesign but. When you try the same thing in InDesign your applied paragraph style dissapears. Probably because logically, the paragraph marker holding the styling info is no longer there. But intuitively this behaviour is not very user friendly.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Well, as we know, InDesign is not Word and the behavior, as designed, when you place text only is to adopt the style applied immediately before the insertion point.

I suspect if you change the preference to all info, presuming the styling is correct in Word, you'll get the behavior you desire, and if you don't want to paste formatted text for some reason you are always able to select Paste without formatting.

rob day

Community Expert

Hi @Ibo Vis , Unless I’m misunderstanding your post, setting the entire paragraph as a selection might be scriptable. Something like this would get the selction’s (insertion point, word, line, etc.) first paragraph. Assign the script a key command:

var s = app.activeDocument.selection[0]
if (s.hasOwnProperty("paragraphs")) {
	app.select(s.paragraphs[0],SelectionOptions.replaceWith)
}  
 
Run script

I

Ibo VisAuthor

Inspiring

I think you are amazing, also adobe should be ashamed for forcing their customers to come up with hacks like this to make it function propperly. Thank you so much! I mighty try your solution. Like I said, "hassle-free".

rob day

Community Expert

Just realized that the script gets the entire paragraph including the return—I think you don’t want the return included? If that’s the case then try this. Don’t think scripting is a hack—it’s part of the application.

var s = app.activeDocument.selection[0]
if (s.hasOwnProperty("paragraphs")) {
	app.select(s.paragraphs[0].insertionPoints[0],SelectionOptions.REPLACE_WITH)
    app.select(s.paragraphs[0].words[-1],SelectionOptions.ADD_TO)
}

Does not select the return:

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