How to find out what paragraph style is based on another style

[Jonlin Creative]

I do book typesetting and sometimes have to hand over the InDesign file to the client. Before doing so, I like to clean up the paragraph styles and make sure all unused styles are deleted.

In a current project, I've got a style that isn't used on any text (I've done a "Find Format" on the document and it doesn't turn up any results). However, it doesn't get selected when I "Select all unused" in the paragraph styles window. When I try to delete it, it asks what I want to replace it with. So I'm assuming that a different style is based on that (otherwise) unused style. I've got quite a few styles in the project, however, and was hoping to avoid the tedium of manually checking each one to see what other style is based on it.

It seems like there should be a simple way to find out what styles are based on another style, but if it exists, I haven't been able to find it. Am I overlooking something simple, or is there really no quick way to find this info?

[Robert Tkaczyk · Accepted solution]

If you are working on a PC - you can use my free version of ID-Tasker:

After you get through FAQ and register InDesign in the system - you just need to click STYLES, PARA then LOAD.

Right now there is only some basic information - but soon there will be every property of the style available to sort and filter by.

Here is something that should work on a Mac and PC:

http://in-tools.com/article/scripts-blog/show-paragraph-based-on-script/

[Jonlin Creative]

Thanks so much for those script recommendations! I tried the one from in-tools and it did just what I needed. That's going to be handy to have!

[Manan Joshi]

Hi @Jonlin Creative,

You rightly guessed that there is no native way to get this information, so you will have to rely on 3rd party solutions, of which some great options are already given by @Robert Tkaczyk. Another way you can access this information is from the Styles.xml file inside the IDML of the document

-Manan

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

ID really needs a coherent, comprehensive style management portal/panel/system. Things like the Paragraph Style Export settings menu are a sketchy model of what should be integral, along the lines of this inquiry and script-driven solutions.