For an index, do all Character Styles have to be changed to none, first off?

This whole document was 100% typed (100s of pages) from scratch on InDesign, with no import of anything on purpose, not even from InCopy, so I would have no glitches from Word or even Apple Pages. (Well, I did copy and paste some URLs from Apple notes into endotes.  To be safe, should those first be pasted into InCopy? But I think that's a side issue here. Although I'd appreciate any advice.) 

By @Troy Deckert

I don't understand - you're doing it from Scratch - so why would you use InCopy - just paste directly to InDesign - no need for a another app. Pasting from Word or Apple pages is a null point - it has no effect on the document except maybe introducing swatches and styles - which you can erradicate in InDesign - by either Paste Without Formatting. 

I don't get what you're doing here.

This is only in the index. Right from scratch the index had a Drop Cap Character Style mixed in.

So, is that left over from when I tinkered with a sample index a year ago?

By @Troy Deckert

Why would an Index have a drop cap? I don't understand this.

Just today, I started a new index from scratch, (no entries had been saved)  I had let the defaults stay as they were of Index Line 1, etc..  I can publish this by manually fixing the index by changing the Drop Cap  24 pt commas. But I want to understand what's happening so I don't create more problems. I read other community threads and they recommended no Character Styles be applied.  

By @Troy Deckert

Why not just not have a drop cap for the comma - you clearly don't need it and restored it to a 'normal' looking size by changing it to 24pt? Is that what you did? - just don't have a drop cap for the comma - why would you have this - it's very confusing for me?

 

So do we always have to start with no Character Styles whatsoever, or go through and get rid of any Character Syles? This is by changing them to no style or none?

 

 Olav Martin Kvern, David Blatner, and Bob Bringhurst's book recommends new Paragraph Styles completely.  So is that the way to go? But also with that, I got  the  Drop Cap showing up in Character Styles still. Was that just from a Character style I set a year ago and forgot about, which is my error here? 

By @Troy Deckert

It could be from a Character style - if you based it on another style.

See this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYOJO5A7w5g

But InDesign can only apply the styles you tell it to. 

It's really hard to know whats going on. 

I don't know what you have read. But it would be completely weird for InDesign to not allow Styles for text. You can aboslutely have styles for your text throughout your document - the Index function is to only create an Index from the text within the document - and it's encouraged to use Paragraph, Character and other Styles throughout your document. 

New Paragraph Styles to be applied to your Index only - so that these new styles are independent of any style changes you may choose to make to your main body text. 

For example, for the body text in the document you may want 'This is a very important paragraph'

But in the index you just want to show it as 'This is a very important paragraph'

As an example (why cos it was easy to do here - and every situation is different).

I'm a bit lost on your workflow here.