Is synchronizing paragraph styles necessary?

[Tom Tomasko]

I have a book that is now 26 chapters. It will be divided into two volumes. I'll use the Book feature to make sure the page numbers flow. I see the value of syncing the styles if I would ever need to change the styles globally. But they are now set in stone so to speak. So I see no advantage to syncing them.

In fact, I am thinking of going chapter by chapter to delete all unused para styles. The first chapter, the TOC, needs no styles from the endnotes chapter at the end and vice versa.

Advice needed: Delete the unused styles in each chapter and not sync?

After the book is printed it will be turned into an ebook. My limited understanding is that it has to be one long document. In that case the para styles of chapter 2 will be imported into chapter 1, etc. But this is way down the road.

Thanks for any advice.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It never hurts to have everything "clean," especially for export to EPUB.

Unused styles are just clutter, of little concern in most respects. But all shared styles in a book should be in sync for many reasons. It's one thing to hit Print; all the digital data just disappears into the ink (or, for the most part, into the PDF). But when you are exporting to another digital format, with styles inherently embedded, you will end up with a cascade of style files and the like, which can be a suitable end but more likely is going to cause problems for style consistency and further export/conversion operations.

Yes, I'd take the time to sync and clean up the styles.