Paragraph styles not stable

[Tom Tomasko]

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

[Tom Tomasko]

I should say they inadvertantly change.

[Randy Hagan]

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

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

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.

[Tom Tomasko]

"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]

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.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Tom Tomasko 

IDMLing is always a good idea - cleans the document from garbage. 

And you should do Save As at least once a day - less time consuming than IDMLing - but also cleans the document from unaccessible unlimited Undo - that is saved when you only do Ctrl+S. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Editing styled material is like doing surgery: you have to keep things meticulously sterile less ickies spread through it.

Pasting in material from ANY source is likely to bring shadow or duplicate or corrupted styles with it. I recommend always using the "paste without formatting" option even if it means you have to spend a few minutes (re)applying clean styles. If not, use the "transfer document" method and paste new material into it, then review all the styles (looking for new ones that have been dragged into the list) and only when you are sure the block is clean, cut and paste it into the end document.

There is absolutely no time to be saved by using shortcut procedures and cutting and pasting outside material directly into a finished working document; you will spend more time fixing problems than you would have "sterilizing" the new material in the first place.

Once broken styles, especially spot/override/shadow styles, start to propagate through a document, you can never trust any editing action and will spend too much time trying to clean up the mess.

Do a meticulous style cleanup on each of your chapters, synchronize the styles, and use scrupulous "import hygiene" to avoid these frustrating style and format problems.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Paste without formatting - Ctrl+Shift+V on PC - no idea how on Mac - Cmd+Shift+V?  

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

And, of course, you can now set this as a default and have the selection icon appear on paste if you like (Preferences | Clipboard Options).

[Barb Binder]

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

[Tom Tomasko]

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]

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?

[Tom Tomasko]

I am about to tackle a new chapter and will only paste text from a plain text file to see what happens.

James, I bought your book on creating e-books. I'll crack that open once this opus is out of the printing plant.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Ah, that's where that beer came from. Thanks! 🙂

[Mike Witherell]

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.

[Peter Spier]

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]

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.

[Peter Spier]

Not sure I understand your point about No Paragraph Style. I'm not saying you use it for any text, but only as the baseline from which to modify and create new ones. That guarantees that some errant imported text styled with Basic Paragraph doesn't alter things on the sly.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

In this sense:

1. Completely adjust [Basic Style] to (usually) the body paragraph style, in every respect. But never use [Basic] in the document directly.
2. Build every subsequent style starting with [Basic Style], so that all your basic settings are propagated without having to laboriously re-spec them each time.
3. Build style hierarchies on each appropriate prior style — all the body variants on "Body Text," all the headings on "Heading 1", and so forth down the tree.
4. BUT... for a style, usually an outlier, that you don't want affected by basic or hierarchical changes, change it to [No Paragraph Style] so that it is completely self-standing.

You could completely ignore [Basic Style] and build all styles on [No], but that takes away the ability to make global tweaks in your hierarchy, such as changing the font globally.

As for importing... I don't think the tradeoff of insulating your styles is worth the loss of control/productivity. The take-away on this whole thread and all that are about imported material is, or should be: You have to do it carefully and with a defined protocol, not just dump Word sewage into your doc.

(Or... if you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage. On the other hand, if you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine... you have a barrel of sewage. Verb. sap. 🙂 )

[Peter Spier]

I don't see any problem using Basic in the doc. You can still edit it and make the global changes for all other styles based on it. Beyond that I think we are in agreement.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I do lean towards using Basic (all of them) only as a model, and not applied to any element in a document. I can't necessarily justify the rule, but it seems to me it will/would/could avoid many problems of both app and user assumption and misuse.

[Peter Spier]

Wait, let's back up a moment. Are you referring to the default [Basic Paragraph] style? I'm referring to a "basic" style you create based on No Paragraph Style, which, like you , is normally configured for Body text, and I name it for it's use, then base other styles on that. I would NEVER edit the default [Basic Paragraph] and then use that as the basis for a style heirarchy.

I don't think you would have problems particularly with bringing in text from another source doing that because in theory the receiving doc should control style definitions, but you sure as heck risk major formatting changes if you try to move that text into another file (which is the intended final opoutput, but has no style already defioned with the same name and you wanted to preserve the style from the source document).

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I don't understand the practice of completely avoiding the [Basic] style in each element. Using it to set the basic parameters for your paragraphs, character and object styles — but never ever using it directly — seems to be both good practice and their purpose.

[Randy Hagan]

I can help answer that one. If everybody is working from the identical setup — whether everybody has their system set to the same custom [Basic Paragraph] or leave it alone and ride with the default settings — there's no issue at all.

But if you and I have different settings for [Basic Paragraph] and we're passing files back and forth, unpredictable issues can crop up. Even if the differences are minor compared to using two fonts.

Copyfit changes, and if you're doing copyfit tricks on your system and handing it to me, it'll often mess up the layout on my system. And if I fix it, it'll mess things up for you when you work on the file again. Character styles application is pot luck if they're built off the default [Basic Paragraph]. And if you are working with, say, the custom-built Body Copy style and don't have that selected in the Paragraph Styles panel before you start doing any keyboarding, [Basic Paragraph] default style will bite us both.

And to put it bluntly, I've had my backside chewed on more than one occasion due to these kinds of issues.

Randy