sync styles in book seems to duplicate styles in groups

[Jay Maechtlen]

Having paragraph styles in groups seems like a cool idea, potentially useful.

However, it seems that syncing styles in the book will create copies of the grouped styles outside the groups.

That makes a mess, with styles everywhere..

Am I doing it wrong?

[Barb Binder]

Hi Jay:

It will if the names don't match exactly—same case, same spelling, same spacing. Can you show us the results?

~Barb

[Jay Maechtlen]

I can see that "Heading 1 - Orange" has a variant with different spacing, but the issue is that these were copied from the "3 Style Group Headings" group to outside the group.

I will try the "select unused function on each of the docs, maybe that will be useful.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Another thing besides style names, be sure to select Smart Match Style Groups in your book's synchronize options.

[Jay Maechtlen]

I left "smart match"  selected, mostly out of ignorance.

Fortunately there were only four docs, one of them intended as a template.

I went through each doc, selected all unused para styles, deleted them.

Then synchronized again,

then went through and deleted the dupe styles outside groups and replaced them with styles in groups (the ones that I wanted to use)

And repeated for each doc, syncing after cleaning each doc, using the most recently cleaned doc as the source.

It looks like things are working ok. The "Select all unused"  feature was a big help.

Yeah, my method may have been somewhat redundant. But it seems to have been effective.

Comments?

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

One thing to be careful about Select all Unused, is that unused doesn't always mean unwanted. You can always Command/Control-click on a style to keep it after selection.

Setting up a consistent naming system for style names across documents is critical, as is using based-on style settings.

For future projects, you can use Find/Change across book documents to replace similar styles with one master style. Also, there is a script that lets you do multiple find/changes at once. However, I prefer using the Multi-Find/Change plugin from Automatication ($50 US).

[Jay Maechtlen]

Thanks - good info there.

I'm using books to tie together related docs, even though they are published as separate manuals.

I hadn't thought of s&r across docs, that should help!

[Jay Maechtlen · Accepted solution]

After cleaning extra styles out from the various docs and re-syncing, I am not seeing the issue.

So it must have been user error.

Thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully these will help others as well.