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Abambo
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 16, 2017
Question

Resetting part of a style to parent...

  • May 16, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 6378 views

Hi community,

By looking at a document created by someone other, I detected some odd (paragraph) style formatting, that I wanted to reset to the parent's values, without having to look into the parent's settings. Is there a solution to this problem? I see what values have been changed, obviously, this is of a great help, but I do not see the original values.

I tried "delete", but that did not work.

1 reply

amaarora
Community Manager
Community Manager
May 16, 2017

Hi,

There can be two cases here:

CASE 1: One style based on other and you want to reset it to the parent style

If you have based paragraph style say P2 on paragraph style P1 (parent) and you want to reset P2 to P1 again all you need to do is click on the "Reset to Base" option in the general tab of Paragraph styles.

As shown below:

CASE 2: Style is applied to some text and is then changed (overriden) and you want to set it back or undo its overriden features

If you have style P1 applied to some text and it has been overriden then you may be seeing a   sign in front of that style in paragraph style dialog box. In that case to remove its overriden features all you need to do is roght click on the style and select "clear overrides" option

-Aman

Abambo
Community Expert
AbamboCommunity ExpertAuthor
Community Expert
May 16, 2017

That's OK when I want to reset all to basic. Indeed I did as this and reattributed the different formatting changes, I needed the styles to have. My document was easy. So that was not the problem. I was more thinking about a feature like in character styles, where you can reset an overwrite to the underlying paragraph styling....

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
Participant
July 14, 2021

No!

I was cleaning up a messy file from one of my colleagues to give it a straight paragraph structure. The file has been taken over from early versions and modified and modified again, and nobody took care to clean-up the file to something clean and straight.

But I need that, as soon as I add a second language layer in a multilanguage document. I create a base for each language and define all styles as dependent directly or indirectly from this style.

I have a paragraph style A, defining a bunch of paragraph properties. Paragraph style B relies on paragraph A but changes a bunch of properties. Now I want to reset the kerning and or other properties back to what is defined in style A.

I have 2 possibilities: RESET TO BASE and recreate the (wanted) differences (what btw I did in my case, as the difference was basically only the character colour) or I could manually adapt the parameter to what is defined in the base (like changing the paragraph language from US English to UK English as used in the base).

The first method supposes that the changes to the child paragraph style are not too important, the second method supposes that you know the parameters as they are defined in the parent style (you know what has been changed, but you do not know the original values). It would be nice to be able to just "delete" (or reset to base for one field only) the overwrite as you can do with character styles for using the paragraph defined parameters.

Character styles depending on a parent are the same, except that thy tend to be easier to handle.

The problem is also present for object styles, but as they are not so extensively used, I have fewer "problems" with them.

I hope this describes the problem better than the short form.


I'm wondering if there was ever a solution to this as I have a similar question.


To simplify what I want, I have BODY (para style) with white text (plus other attributes, not relevent) which is applied to everything. I then have SUBTITLE (para style) for subtitles Based on: BODY style with a change in colour to pink and various changes to basic character formats.

Lets say I don't want it pink anymore and I want it to revert to whatever the BODY parent style has. BUT I do not want to revert all of it because I want to keeo all of the basic character formatting.

I ALSO do not want to simply change it to the same colour as the parent manually because what if I am told to change the colour of the BODY... I will then also need to go into SUBTITLE and change it to match. 

 

So, is there a way to clear individual options  (ONLY colour, ONLY font size etc) from a paragraph style to revert back to the parent property?

 

This post is about 4 years ol so I'm curious is anything has changed since then.