preserve local overrides.

[Mano23]

Hi,

we have long book which is created by others and we need to export as epub reflowable, we update all fonts, and for sure all styles now have many overrides.

i cannot do it one by one, there are many everrides everywhere!

My questions:

1. When i click on Preserve local overrides wihtout updating the styles, what will happen to the css?

2. is there any script to redefine styles for document at once?

3. is ther any script to create styles for text that not have applied into style?

thank you

[Willi Adelberger]

Use consequent paragraph styles.

Instead of using local overrides, use character styles.

In both, paragraph and character styles define the html and epub export settings.

Never, never do manual overides.

[Mano23]

can you clrify more for me?

[Willi Adelberger]

What is the problem, you do not understand? Paragraph and Character Styles are the basic concept of Indesign’s text formatting, and also in other programs like Word, QuarkXpress, FrameMaker and other programs.

[Mano23]

what will happen if i did not redefine style, and checked the preserve local overrides in the export panel.

[Willi Adelberger]

What will happen if you do not redefine styles? You get the style as defined? Sorry, I think that you should book a basic class for InDesign.

[Mano23]

i am an expert and i have more than 20 years using indesign!

[Willi Adelberger]

WHAT HINDERS YOU TO USE APPROPRIATE PARAGRAPH, CHARACTER AND OBJECT STYLES? USE THEM.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's not uncommon to get complete crap from authors and companies, and it takes hours of tedious work to convert everything to a meticulous style-based layout... which is the only form that will export correctly. Not being the author or an SME makes it much harder, as you have to blindly follow the author's formatting and not make any unintended changes to content, emphasis etc.

[Mano23]

we have to change the style, these are old books and they use very old fonts that not working at all.

Publishers are confermed to change the font.

do you mean that we should change and styles manually one by one?

[Willi Adelberger]

If everything is defined with styles, go to Find Fonts, there select the missing font, choose the new font and tick the  option to redefine styles if all are selected.

[Mano23]

we cannot do redefine on each paragraph manually! long document full of overrides. 

[Willi Adelberger]

Use find and replace, it will solve a lot of problems.

[Mano23]

seems like you did not understand my issue, all styles are there, we (me and my team) have updated the fonts in the styles. we have many books, we need a script to redefine, to avoid do this manually.

thank you for your answer. this is not what am looking for!

[Willi Adelberger]

If the formatting was not done professional you will have to do this manually. And if every book was done with a different system it will cause more problems.

[Mano23]

the styles already full of overrides, i used a script clearstyleoverrides.jsx
I hope to find a script to redefine the style for all doc at once. i have downleded one and i will try it.

will share my experience.

[Mano23]

looking for script, we have many old books that full of overrides from the original designer.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There is no shortcut. Some optimized scripts might streamline parts of the process, but if you have random, non-style-based formatting across multiple books, even from a single designer, it's going to take designer attention to the process and details to get where you need to be.

It's one thing to sort of "paint over" mistakes and bad formatting for print; everything is WYSIWYG for that. But e-book export demands meticulous if not perfect structure under the "what you see" to get any kind of acceptable result.

It may be worth working directly with a scripting wizard to develop some pre-processing and cleanup scripts that do as much as possible — and I would not expect that degree of expertise and effort for free — but unless there is extraordinary consistency in this "bad" formatting, it's going to be a largely manual process. Only such highly customized/optimized scripts are likely to be of much use; it's very unlikely that any existing, generic script will be of any use.

That, or strip all formatting and reformat using styles according to best judgment of a current designer, which is again page by page, manual/interactive work.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Mano23 

If you work on Windows - you could use my ID-Tasker tool - not free, but I can give you temporary access to the full version.

As long as you can specify which local overrides you want to keep - you can choose from 400+  text properties - it will create new Styles based on those overrides - and use them so you won't end up with 100s of copies of styles with the same formatting.

Or, if you are a Mac user or simply don't want / can't use my tool - you can send me your file(s) on priv and I'll convert them for you.

Below is an example of processing document with text "formatted" using only "Normal" ParaStyle and local formatting - imported from WORD.

First Task controls what formatting should be preserved - for CharStyles - and controls  through the Sorting order - the names of the created CharStyles - in this case AppliedFont+PointSize+FontStyle+Position.

Then second Task do the "hard work".

Formatting of the text before:

(each TextStyleRange represents text that has unique formatting applied - it can be a CharStyle or a local override)

And after:

(It's pretty mmuch exactly the same part of the text)

It's a screenshot from an early tests - it would need one more pass - removal of CharStyles that have the same formatting as applied ParaStyle, but it's easy as both styles will have the same name.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Or there is another way - load basic info about all TextStyleRanges and execute Task that will create a new CharStyle for each TSR:

Then, in Styles browser - show extra properties that might be interested / required - and examine the differences / what has been "preserved":

Because, when you click on add a new CharStyle - and some text selected - InDesign will only apply properties that differ from the applied ParaStyle.

Overall, it's almost identical to what I've suggested earlier - but user can shift naming for later.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

For clarification - first method can remove some extra formatting - where 2nd method will not. 

First method - will create CharStyle with some formatting applied to the first found instance and apply the name.

If creating another CharStyle will result in using the same name - formatting of the previously created CharStyle will be used.

So, in case that there was a color used for underline in the 2nd occurrence - but not in the 1st - and wasn't selected as part of the name / property that should be preserved - it will be lost.

That's why 2nd method is a "safer". Will need deeper visual examination of all created styles in the browser part of IDT - but not to manually opening each style in the InDesign and clicking through all the tabs. 

Of course, this part can be automated as well 🙂 Report from multiple documents can be created and then everything can be checked together - either in the IDT itself or in Excel / as HTML web page. 

If someone wants to preserve only some basic formatting - and get rid of all WORD's automatic trash - 1st method is better.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The only real solution is to replace spot overrides with Character Styles. A short version of the process is —

• Create simple Character Styles for bold, italic, bold-italic, etc. By simple, I mean to define ONLY the highlight characteristic, so that, for example, applying it doesn't change the font, size, spacing etc.
• Using Find/Replace or GREP searching, search for all text with a font-level "italic" applied; substitute the Italic style.
• Repeat for each override style you need to preserve.

This is an EXCELLENT place to turn on ID's override highlight—

— so that you can see where overridden text needs to be fixed.

In the end, you need an InDesign file in which all text is assigned a base Paragraph Style, and all spot changes are assigned a Character Style. You simply can't get to a clean EPUB export without meeting both rules.

Happy to answer further questions — I do this sort of thing all day long in both Word source documents and InDesign layouts.

[Mano23]

the books are done by unprofessionals, all text have overrides highlights. when i fix the font from styles, the font changed but overriodes highlights still there! 

[Willi Adelberger]

THe file must be repaired. Manual overrides must be avoided.

[Joel Cherney]

For your question number three: here's a CreativePro article about the preptext.js script, and Jongware's PerfectPrepText. It's not perfectly suited to your situation, but it'll get you closer to the finish line of having a well-styled file. Like, you, I handle other desinger's work, and very often it feels like it's better practice to leave their unstyled overridden mess in place. The minute you start to clean it up, it gets worse, right?

But, especially if epub is your target export format, you really do have to clean up the styles in order to get reliable output. I haven't spent much time experimenting with it, but basically when I used the "preserve local overrides" checkbox, a lot of the formatting dropped out, and the CSS was a confusing mess. When you use a tool like PerfectPrepText to autostyle something, the tool winds up finding all of the places where there are style conflicts, which as you already know makes a whole lot of fiddly work.  But when you let the epub autogenerate the CSS from those overrides, you get the same mess but without any way to fix it without hacking the CSS directly. 

Unfortunately I don't have any good answers for number 2. It's not hard to write a script that loops through the styles and performs changes to them - I write 'em all the time, when I need to adjust styles en masse for right-to-left scripts - but I don't know of any general-purpose style management script that is, you know, just a script you can download that will do that for you. I know of some plugins that have some functionality in that area - e.g. if you needed print marketing automation, I do recall that the priint plugin for InDesign had some style management tools - but none of them are fit for your purpose. If you can figure out exactly what kinds of document-wide style redefinition you need, it might be a place where you could save time & money by having a bit of custom script development done on your behalf. The only script I can think of that is even vaguely relevant was a snippet that I got from Gabe Harbs, years ago, that shows the "based on" style inheritance. So if your original designer made a root style and then based other styles upon it