Highlighting non-contiguous words/phrases so a paragraph style can be assigned in one click

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
May 22, 2025
2 replies
750 views

I read an old question (2019) that said you cannot highlight non-contiguous words/phrases. I'm wondering if this has changed now and if there is a way to do this. I want to highlight subheadingins in chapter and assign a paragraph style and change them with one click!

How to

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @Wilton PublishingServices :

You can vote for this as a feature request here:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/39213130-non-contigious-text-selections

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

BobLevine

Community Expert

Not to throw cold water on it, but 18 votes in five years? Not gonna get much traction.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Nothing's changed. Could likely be scripted.

If you're bringing styled text in, you could map styles from Word or do a find/change, but that requires some forethought.

W

Wilton PublishingServicesAuthor

Known Participant

It's been a bit of a nightmare. The Word document had been copied from a PDF (far from ideal) then amended so of course the formatting was all over the place. So I had to import into Indesgn and then assign character styles to the text (as there were italics and bold interspersed amongst the text that I wanted to keep and two styles of typeface) so I could then unformat the text but keep the italics and bold in place. I have then had to create paragraph rules to use as well and remember to change character styles to 'none' so the paragraph style would work. As it is a laborious job that is now having to be formatted by hand, being able to highlight non-contiguous text would have saved me so much time.

W

Wilton PublishingServicesAuthor

Known Participant

@Wilton PublishingServices

If you have access to WORD - you can use those macros in WORD first:

http://id-tasker.com/uploads/WordStyle.zip

They'll change all bold, italic, sub/super-scripts, underline - and all combinations - into CharStyles.

Then you can import this new text into InDesign.

Actually I changed the text into character styles after I imported the Word document so I could delete the formatting which worked fine. I then left justified the book and created paragraph styles for lists and any text without italics in it. Anything with italics in the paragraph I'm making any amendments needed manually although so far seems fine. What would save so much time is being able to highlight all the headings together and change and all the subheadings and change at once. But if only 18 poeple have asked for this then I guess Adobe think it's not needed that much, but I'm pretty sure more than 18 designer who are on here would find it useful!

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