Merging documents without content changing from style differences

[OsakaWebbie]

Is there a way to copy/merge whole pages of content from one document to another and prevent any changes due to differing definitions of commonly named styles? In my imagined perfect world, I'd like any differences to become overrides on the pasted/merged content. Even lowly MS Office offers that as an option when pasting - see this little labeled screenshot from a Microsoft tips page. (Usually I hate Office, but in this instance they're onto something.) I'm not sure exactly what "Merge Formatting" does, but I think something similar to "Keep Source Formatting" is what I'm after. As far as I know, InDesign seems to only do "Use Destination Style", but I'm hoping there is a trick I don't know.

Context and details:

Another designer and I work on a magazine. I'm responsible for the "master" document, merging in the articles he lays out. At the beginning of every issue's design cycle, I prepare the master document and then save a template from it for him to use for his articles. Then I work on my stuff directly in the master (because I do most of the design anyway), and later merge his stuff in.

I used to use the Pages-Drag-n-Drop method of merging (see Method 5 on this page), but the layout of his articles almost always changed somewhat during the merge, for reasons I never figured out. So lately I have been just copying all the content of each spread (Method 1). [Fortunately most of the articles are a single spread, so that doesn't break text flows.] That has been working better, but it's not foolproof - still sometimes something changes slightly (most typically, some text will wrap a little differently, which can sometimes throw off the length of a column), even though both of us swear that we didn't edit any styles. We use different OSes (he's on Mac, me on Win10), but that shouldn't matter. All our fonts are TypeKit except Adobe Garamond Pro. (Hmm, could that one font be different between OSes? It's our main article text font, so it's use is very pervasive.)

And even if that worked correctly, it's restricting. Sometimes while I'm working I'll notice something about a style that should be improved, but I don't dare edit the style while we are working in parallel. I have to just put up with it for the time being, and make notes for myself to hopefully remember to make the modification between magazine issues.

So if there is a way to copy content (or merge pages - I don't care what technique) and have the imported content not change because of differences in style definitions (or whatever ghosts seem to still haunt us even when we're careful), that would be a great help to my workflow. But I don't want to use PDF as an intermediary or "place" his document - I want to end up with a single editable InDesign document for the whole magazine. As I said, my imagined mechanism would be for the imported content to adopt overrides for any differences in a common style. But renaming a differing incoming "My Style" style to "My Style-1" or something (preferably based on "My Style" so I can see the differences) would also work. Can InDesign do anything like this?

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS · Accepted solution]

Have you tried dropping all the same-name styles into a uniquely named folder in your Paragraph and Character Styles panels before you import?

[OsakaWebbie]

Wow, thank you! I had no idea that a style in a group is considered different than the same-named style outside a group (or in a different group). I assumed that styles were required to be uniquely named throughout the document and groups were just for visual organization. But I guess groups are more like folders in a filing system, allowing files of the same name in different ones. I tested your idea and it works beautifully. Now I'm free to improve the main styles without worrying about it affecting imported content.

My test did not include any articles whose text had done the mysteriously different line wrapping (I don't remember which articles had that problem in the last issue), but the more I think about it, the more I suspect that problem is not related to styles - perhaps something about the fonts on the two computers. Now that I know how to isolate the styles, I'll do that each time, and if the wrapping problem happens again, I'll write a fresh question.

[Laubender]

I assumed that styles were required to be uniquely named throughout the document and groups were just for visual organization.

Hi OsakaWebbie ,

unfortunately that's true for the Swatches panel. Swatches are different from styles even if you can group them.

You cannot have the same name of a swatch twice even if they are organized in different groups.

Not so with Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, Cell Styles or Object Styles.

Regards,
Uwe

[OsakaWebbie]

Thanks for the additional clarification. In my case that's not a problem. First of all, a swatch is simple to verify or compare - there are only four "settings" (CMYK) instead of who-knows-how-many for a style. (Okay, there's a little more if it's a gradient swatch, but you see my point.) Secondly, we create new swatches for specific articles (and name them after the article author, so there won't be conflict), but we never mess with our magazine's standard palette.