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Question

preserve local overrides.

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
December 25, 2024
5 replies
2159 views

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

TᴀW

Legend

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

Yes: https://www.id-extras.com/products/search-in-styles/

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

Yes: https://www.id-extras.com/products/auto-character-styles/

manal shanableh

Legend

try the script perfectpreptext it might help you
other script may work for you (clearoverrides)

good luck

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

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

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

You almost connect the two essential points here: yes, there are scripts that can do a lot of cleanup, and may even be "tweakable" to handle specific cases. But such cleanup for print is one thing, and getting an ID doc clean enough for EPUB export is another order of kettled fish entirely.

I might be getting a look at a sample file and then can say better, but I think this is one of those cases — a perpetually recurring case — where scripts can do a lot, but not eliminate any but the most rote work of fixing such docs page by page. Only in the unlikely case that a designer used a methodical and rigorous method that was NOT proper ID style management is it likely a script can convert one "format" to another.

As we all know, having to work with badly formatted material is both perpetual and frustrating — and that's in trying to get it to print from ID.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

I did actually think about making that connection overtly, and then realized that I was going to wind up writing something a lot longer than a post. (Also there's only one person in the thread who's really going to like my solution!)

There are some jobs that I do by hand, stepping through the document page by page. There are other jobs that I automate to the point of "I run a single script, and then it's done." In the middle, there's a lot of room for error. For example, if I don't check the style interitance before I start stepping through the file page by page, then it's disturbingly possible for a change I make to an infrequently-used style on page 200 might cause changes to styles I'd fixed on pages 1 through 199. So it's possible for top-down changes made from style management scripts to actually increase the total format time, over what would have been faster to brute-force with a million clicks. And I can't think of any way to operationalize the process of figuring out which strategy will be less time-consuming.

Much depends on the idiosyncracy of the initial designer, and I have actually found (diverging from your experience) that it's often faster to script a clean-up solution to mop up after someone who used no styles at all, than it is to clean up after someone who used styles inexpertly, or someone who doesn't really get style management using an INDT made by a Style Wizard. There are too many variables for me to make a blanket claim like "only methodical and rigorous methods yield easily to scripted solutions." In fact, if you get preptext and PerfectPrepText up and running, you'll find that completely unformatted Word files that only use Normal parastyle and local formatting become some of your fastest projects. That's what I found, back in the bad old days when people still sent me Word files to format.

As you note, EPUB export from InDesign requires even more careful adherence to good styling than a normal print doc. So in my own personal shoes, I've found that automating a few steps saves me a lot of clicks. I mean, I don't do much EPUB work, but I get it done really fast, because a) I can automate some of the script-based style management, and let's be frank here b) I've read a bunch of your own posts on the matter. But the knowledge I've acquired regarding good EPUB export strategy wouldn't be of much use if I hadn't spent the last years trying to bootstrap myself into writing real code, instead of just duck-taping other people's code and hoping.

But! If you can't write JS, there's no real point in chasing those automation solutions. There isn't going to be a good style management script for the OP, because all such solutions require significant in-house dev expertise to adjust such tools to fit. That's when it's time to look at low-code solutions, for people who are good at thinking logically & programmatically, but who don't know ES3-era JS in the form of Extendscript. For such people, using some kind of low-code or no-code automation tool that has a built-in user community with its own developer to help you build multi-pass solutions where your book cleanup requires many separate steps.

The best candidate I've seen thus far, price-perfomance-wise, is actually Robert's ID-Tasker. You get the no-code/low-code automation, you get the robust user community, you get the private developer to rescue you from situations where you've cornered yourself & don't know enough VB to code your way out of it, and you get it for a price that is much lower than the all-encompassing ID-Server-based solutions that occupy the same market segment.

If you wanted to do more of the heavy lifting yourself, David Blatner's Power Styles does the same kind of auto-style-generation trick as the PerfectPrepText I mentioned earlier, with a predictably large amount of post-script cleanup, and also with the caveat that there will be some kinds of styling where blindly using the script will actually create more work.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

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.

M

Mano23Author

Known Participant

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

Community Expert

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

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

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.

M

Mano23Author

Known Participant

can you clrify more for me?

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

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.

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