Fix local overrides on style import?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Working with a large book ms in Word, something I've done many times, but this time I have encountered something I don't recall seeing/dealing with before.

I am working through import iterations and mapping the Word styles to newly defined ID styles. Everything is fine except that ID is retaining local formatting on each of these styles. Every BODY paragraph, for example, is retaining things like the original font and size as well as trivial settigns like hyphenation. Every character style is properly defined and applied, but the text retains the formatting of the original as a spot override.

Is there a way to force a style redefinition to clear local spot formatting, both paragraph and character? It appears to affect nearly all the paragraphs of the book, and I'm not sure I've ever seen this before. I really can't Clear Overrides on every single one...

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[J E L]

Hey, James. I hear you. I had this happen to me with mapping a few months ago with version 17.2.1. Is this happening with 17.3? I must have tried 10 different ways to map it in right and couldn't get anything to stick. My Word document was totally clean to begin with (since I'm the one who set it up) and I've done mapping dozens and dozens of times before with no issues. I tried converting text to rich text, .doc instead of .docx, all the other "tricks" but in the end, I manually cleaned and corrected the styles because I was out of ideas and had to get started. I haven't done a big map like that since, but I think something is wonky. I don't know of any way to force style redefinition to clear local spot formatting for either paragraph or character. If there is one, I'd like to know, too. I am going to go through mapping again soon with a new book project. BTW, I use MS Office Home and Business 2019.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, thanks, at least I know it's not me and I have not imagined doing this seamlessly before.

The solution, besides a lot of really tedious style mapping (I've been able to be sloppy about this in the past and fix things as I go in the ID doc), is to do Find/Replace on each style as I encounter it. Search for paragraph return in BODY, replace with paragraph return in BODY, all BODY paragraphs (and all correctly-mapped character styles within) fixed. Kind of sledgehammer but it works, and I am on a tight deadline for this one.

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[J E L]

Heh, I feel the same way... misery loves company, as they say. I am rather compulsive about not having any style overrides in my documents at all. I think you'll agree, this ultimately helps when exporting to ePub to get clean HTML. Maybe it doesn't matter in the long run, but old habits die hard. I use a full PreFlight check to warn me for overrides without ignoring anything. On that project, I ended up getting the best map I could, and then I went through all the override errors to apply the correct character style. It became a meditation, lol. A 600+ page book! I used Find/Replace for a lot of these as well. I'm curious what I'll encounter with this next time.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This is a dual format book, so it has to be meticulous. So, lots of slogging this weekend.

Amusingly enough... it's about AI.

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[J E L]

Well, good luck, and thanks for bringing it up. I didn't want to mention it myself at the time because I, too, briefly questioned my memory that I had always done this seamlessly before.

[Barb Binder]

Did you Select All and click the Clear Overrides in Selection button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel?

~Barb

[J E L]

Thanks, Barb, yes, I tried that, but it removed the imported italics which wouldn't map to my italics character style. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Similar results. It cleans up "too much."

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[J E L]

Exactly. That's what I mean by I couldn't get the mapping to "stick" and in some trials with different settings, I had the same thing happen as you explain here, "Every character style is properly defined and applied, but the text retains the formatting of the original as a spot override."