Retain formatting in paste but have Paragraph style override font

[Kevin355787030sro]

Hello all, and thank you for the help. I have searched and found a few similar posts but not the same request.

I am pasting from an outside document that has formatting into indesign, and hope to retain the formatting but change the font family, size and color to my assigned Paragraph style.

I have changed the clipboard handling to paste All Information.

I have a paragraph style set up.

I paste into the text box and it changes the size and color of the text, but does not change the font family.

I will make sure that Character style is set to None on the imported text.

Strangely enough if I click through different styles and back to my paragraph style it will (seemingly randomly) sometimes change the font family, but often only the first 2 paragraphs (after Hard line breaks), leaving the third with the original pasted font family. I can not seem to replicate  why this happens . Something must be overriding the font styling, but I can not seem to figure out what it might be, or how to override it without wiping the formatting.

 

This is an example of a text box in which the first two paragraphs have been styled to my font family, but the last paragraph is retaining the old pasted family, despite applying the paragraph style to the whole text.

Any leads would be greatyl appreciated.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Are you copy&pasting from another INDD Document? Or completely different application? 

[Kevin355787030sro]

>From a different app. I have to transfer from my app - to text edit - to
indesign.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

>From a different app. I have to transfer from my app - to text edit - toindesign.
By @Kevin355787030sro

What do you mean by "text edit"? 

Could you please share more details? 

If it's a "plain text editor" - then any formatting will be completely removed? 

[Kevin355787030sro]

I am using a web app called Airtable. I copy out of Airtable into the mac app Text Edit, and from there to Indesign. It is a strange workflow, but the only way to retain my formatting out of Airtable. For some reason copying directly from Airtable to Indesign does not keep the formatting, but if I simply go from Airtable to TextEdit to Indesign it does. I am not converting it to plain text. I assume this is where its picking up some strange formatting that is overriding Indesign - but I am hoping to be able to decipher where that is happening from within Indesign, or at the very least understand why that is happening.

[Eugene Tyson]

I tend to copy to Notes - it seems to work better than TextEdit, at least for me. 

Retains the formatting quite well. But I don't know anythingabout AirTable.

[Kevin355787030sro]

Strange, I just tried notes and although it did copy my formatting from Airtable, it did not retain the formatting when I paste from Notes into Indesign.

[Eugene Tyson]

It might come in as Apple font which doesn't show the font properly.

But I guess I have a different process to you. I use a script to style the characters then apply Body Text paragraph style.

[Scott Falkner]

Is there a character style applied? You might have set a default character style by selecting one in the Character Styles panel. This wil apply the character style which will override the character formatting in the paragraph style.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Is there a character style applied? [...] 

By @Scott Falkner

No, there isn't. 

[Eugene Tyson]

I use this script 

https://github.com/firedevelop/id0000013-Adobe-InDesign-Scripts-Examples/blob/master/id0000088-Find-...

Save it as a plain text file in plain text editor and change the extension to .jsx

When you paste your content - insert your cursor at the start and then run the script

It will create the character styles bold, italic etc. 

Then apply your Paragraph Style and clear the overrides. 

You may need to delete the created character styles - which will prompt you to map them to another style.

So if you have BOLD in the character styles already and it creates a style called bold - delete the bold style and replace with BOLD from your already created styles. 

That's optional of course, and you can always do the opposite way so you don't have to keep replacing them. 

[Laubender]

Hi @Kevin355787030sro ,

I would try the script RichPaste by Marc Autret:

RichPaste | Copy and Paste with Minimal Formatting [UPDATE]

Marc Autret, April 06, 2016

When it comes to pasting text from another document or application, InDesign provides two options, either keeping the original text attributes, fonts, styles (the full 'Paste' feature), or removing all attributes ('Paste without formatting'.) We also have tools and preferences in the field of style mapping, but on many occasions these features do not fit the need of dealing quickly with basic formatting problems. Here RichPaste comes to the rescue…

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2015/10/richpaste-copy-and-paste-with-minimal-formatting

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[Eugene Tyson]

I have that installed too - I haven't had much success with it - maybe I'm doing something wrong - have you any tips or best practice for using it? 

It has me stumped.

[Laubender]

Hi Eugene,

don't think that you can do something wrong with Marc's script.

Maybe success depends on from what source the text is copied over?

And of course the kind of formatting you would like to copy over. No issue with bold or italic or a combination with that for example if there is a bold, a italic or a bold italic style in the target font.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[Eugene Tyson]

Yeh ok - makes sense, copying from a Word doc to an InDesign file with a lot of premade styles, and it's a mess of a document so thought this would help and speed things up. But when I copied from Word to the InDesign document, it made everything say Bold where only the 2nd word in the Word doc was Bold. 

Maybe I'll try on simplified documents in the future. Didn't really have time to investigate it, but I'll keep going with it because I want it to work, just not in this complex mess I inherited. 

[Barb Binder]

I use a slightly different approach:

• Create character styles in advance (in the screenshot I see Italics and Bold Italics, but for demo purposes, I just created a character style called Italics and added blue to help highlight),
• Assign the character styles via Find/Change (save it as a Query or use Find/Change by List so that it's quick), then
• Assign the paragraph style(s) and remove overrides.

~Barb