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Question

Paragraph styles not stable

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
December 16, 2022
5 replies
2344 views

Hello,

I am working on a 2,000 page book. The author sends me corrections and I make those corrections (in each chapter, the book is not one long story!). But often the paragraph styles change. Not where I make the correction but somewhere else. The styles are not stable. I have some GREP searches to find most of these changes, but not possible to get to them all. The author has to find them which slows everything down. Has anyone run into this problem and have a solution?

Thanks,

Tom

Performance

This topic has been closed for replies.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

This is possible: if paragraph styles are based on other things like "Normal" or "Basic Paragraph Style" then copy n pasting might at some point bring in styles that remap Basic Paragraph Style which then trickles down to the style that is based on one of those elemental things.

The point is: definitely use paragraph styles, but generally speaking, have them all be "Based On: No Paragraph Style" so that they cannot be inadvertently changed by moments of copy n paste.

Mike Witherell

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Whie any "base" paragraph styles you define yourself should be based on No Paragraph style, I think it's OK and even desirable to base other styles on those you've defined yourself where that might be appropriate for similar paragraphs that differ in only one or two attributes.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Brainiac

Oh, absolutely — hierarchicical (that took three passes to type correctly) styles are key and essential to any layout more complex than a memo.

I am of two minds on the Basic Paragraph/No Paragraph choice, though. When I need a style to remain absolutely unchanged in a hierarchy, I will change it to No Paragraph, but generally after it has been styled from what it absorbed from a prior base style. That produces consistency on the many minor settings I probably would have to laboriously reconfigure from a truly "No paragraph style" start.

But I'm not sure non paragraph style the best choice for the base fonts — such as "body" and "heading one," though. I've found it useful to modify Basic Paragraph to the very basic settings for a book's body font, particularly in font face, size and spacing, so that everything I create from there starts with my, well, basic choices and I don't have strangely-formatted Minion show up out of nowhere.

I do fully understand the "don't touch the red button" nature of the "Basic" style defintions, though, which some users may not have fully grasped along with the pitfalls of hierarchical styles.

But I think this may be at the root of the OP's strange issues — something is nudging a base or lower-level style, which causes weird changes down the chain.

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @Tom Tomasko:

Are these text corrections or formatting corrections? Style don't update themselves. If you think that's happening, we will need some more clues to help you figure this out.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

T

Tom TomaskoAuthor

Known Participant

These are text corrections. Not sure what more clues I can give.

I make a PDF of the ID file and send that to the author. He reads the PDF and finds words he wants to change. He sends the PDF back with comments. Some comments are just to strike words, phrases or whole sentences. Some corrections are to paste in new material. It is after I make all the corrections I find that some para styles have changed but they are not the ones I worked on.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Brainiac

Okay. That's something different.

Can you just open a file, make a few random edits (maybe do this on a copy... 🙂 ) and not have the problem occur? Or does it only occur when you paste in new material?

If the latter, it's still related to bringing foreign style definitions into the doc, but I can't quite figure out the specifics.

Do you do anything at the Book level during/after making these edits?

James Gifford—NitroPress

Brainiac

Your description is a little vague (change how, for example?) but here's a few thoughts:

Styles must be rigidly defined and applied, without ANY spot changes or overrides. If you want a change within a paragraph, use only defined Character Styles, not spot overrides.

If you have spot changes, they can "stick" to editing and propagate through the material, suddenly causing new inserts to appear with the override formatting.

Styles need to be coordinated across all component chapter files of a Book. Synchronizing styles across all component files is a bit of a fussy process but will keep style variations among chapter files from making a mess.

Pasting in new material will bring styles with it (from sources like Word or even PDFs), which will pollute your styles list and create another unintended change that can propagate through editing. If you can, always paste "plain - unformatted" and then apply the correct styles to it, or use a buffer document — one with the same styles as the book, so you can paste the material there, fix all the style issues, then do a clean cut and paste into the book file.

That's what's coming to mind from extensive experience working with outside material and corrections.

T

Tom TomaskoAuthor

Known Participant

"Pasting in new material will bring styles with it (from sources like Word or even PDFs),"

This seems like it may be the culprit. I have pasted from a PDF, from the Comments section. I'll try to first paste to a txt document with plain text and then copy/paste from there. PDFs have para sytles?

The change is that a paragraph simply "adopts" a new para style that I have already defined. For instance, a block quote becomes a regular para style. And this happens o paragraphs I am not even correcting.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

This is the sort of wierd stuff that can sometimes happen when a file has gone through lots of revisions, particualrly if you never do a Save As to a new file name (and I recommend you do that frequently, but I understand it can be a hassle with a Book).

Make a backup copy of the problem file(s) so you don't lose them, then export to .idml, open that and save as .indd. Ordinarily I say never overwrite the file from which you exported .idml, but unless you want to rebuild the .indb book file (which may or may not be a hassle, depending on how big), you may want to in this case.

The trip through .idml may fix things, or if not at least you won't be any worse off.

R

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

I ran into it like 6-7 years ago doing book layout. I had a client who had reset their default font from the Times Roman used in former days to an Old Garamond, because that was the company used for its correspondence and in-house collaterals. It scrambled things something fierce.

The solution was to reset preferences to InDesign defaults across the graphics arts staff, then use paragraph styles and templates to call the correct font rather than altering InDesign defaults. Everybody's got to be copacetic. In your situation, that'd mean that you (and the author, if the author's working with InDesign on your book project) should reset your preferences to work from the same baseline. You can read about how to do that through this link.

From there, you should get more consistent results with your paragraph and character styling.

Hope this helps,

Randy

T

Tom TomaskoAuthor

Known Participant

I should say they inadvertantly change.

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