[Basic Paragraph] in Indesign

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
November 26, 2021
2 replies
722 views

What does [basic paragraph] within paragraph styles usually get used for? Is there a best practice for using this one? Or does it make sense to use this for the style you think you'd use the most?

Thank you!

How to

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rob day

Community Expert

Hi @1975992 Also, the reason [Basic Paragraph] causes problems is, when you copy and paste styled text, and there is a style with the same name in the destination document, the destination’s style definition is used for the pasted text—the pasted text’s formatting could change without warning.

Even if you don’t use [Basic Paragraph] you’ll have to consider syle naming when you cut and paste. The same problem would occur if you were cutting and pasting between documents, that happened to have styles named A-Head, but with different definitions. You can sync two document’s styles by using the Paragraph Styles’ Load Styles—in that case you can choose which definitions you want to sync.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

@rob day, that's correct.

ALL styles can become corrupted with a copy/paste between documents.

I wish Adobe would allow us to choose how to handle styles when we paste, similar to MS Word's excellent, quick utility:

Here are some ideas from UserVoice that you might want to vote up. It's the only way we have to let Adobe know what features we want in InDesign.

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

Scott Falkner

Community Expert

Basic Paragraph is one of the worst features of InDesign. I consider it an avoidable bug. I recommend you change your defaults when no files are open so that Basic Paragraph is not selected in the Styles panel, which means default text will ahve no paragraph style. In the future do not edit Basic Paragraph, do not apply it to any text, and make sure any paragraph styles you create are not based on Basic Paragraph.

David Blatner explains why very well here.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Everything Scott said. On large projects, I use a trick that may or may not work for everyone: in addition to setting [BP] to some useful set of parameters so that everything I generate is easier to manage, I set the color to something like Magenta. Then I define Body or Body Text from that, and set the color back to black, and then build everything forward from that style.

The advantage? Any time I see pink text, something isn't right in my catalog of styles.

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