Deleting all Para, Char, Table Formats and importing new Template

If you have to do this for a lot of files, I'd suggest getting Rick Quatro's FindChangeFormatsBatch plugin. You can use it to create a table with all the formats in use listed and pair them with the new names you want, and then running the script will rename everything for you in an entire book. It'll also delete the old formats from the document. I've been making extensive use of it as I redesign the templates at work. He has another plugin for deleting formats that is also useful for getting rid of unused master pages or reference pages.

Hi Urthie:

Welcome back. It's been a while!

My approach is to use Alt+d (I just hold it down in any of the Delete Formats From Catalog until all of the formats are gone), then import the new formats/styles. The ones with the same names will match up. Then try Bob's suggest of Create and Apply to draw out the paragraphs using styles that weren't in the template you just imported from. Retag and remove. Remember that you can also use Find/Change to find overrides and remove them, which is useful at this point in your documentation.

As for the bullets, you need a character style. I wrote this up for a student years ago, but it still works: https://www.rockymountaintraining.com/adobe-framemaker-but-i-dont-want-a-plain-round-bullet/. To this day I don't know why I chose a squirrel bullet in the example.   Please ignore the squirrel and the font change—just make a character style for the new larger size and assign it through the Paragraph Designer as shown.

~Barb

You can, in effect, "empty" the catalogs, but that only really thoroughly deletes those formats not used by any content.

Any content that was tagged is still there, and still carrying those formats, which are now merely non-catalog formats.

I have no fond memories of having to clean up old documents carrying generations of various formats of different (often obtuse) names, but all serving the same role. Delete all. Utilities > Create And Apply. Save as MIF. Search and replace with current names in a text editor. There are likely nicer tools for this now.

IIRC all formats are additive unless they are the same name as the ones they are replacing. The easiest way is to use the Import function to just bring over what you want (paragraph tags, character tags, variables, etc.)