Understanding the Need for Overrides in InDesign Style Sheets

This may not apply to you and your methods, so take no offense in that case — but using InDesign well demands an organized approach and structured methods. If you're bringing in skills and methods used in less-demanding tools, what you're running into is that Word etc.'s "finger painting" techniques, designed to make their apps easy for even the most nontechnical, untrained user, just don't lead to good results in ID. You have to plan, think ahead and build documents with form and structure, not one element at a time.

Three players in this game of "what will your text look like?'

1. Fundamentally, paragraphs should be controlled by a Paragraph Style that defines all typesetting attributes, including the attributes like typeface, size, leading. This is your main workhorse.

2. Add a dash of interest here and there (for example, italicized words) by making and applying a Character Style, which overrides the Paragraph Style to change the look of the text. These are used less than Paragraph Styles, generally-speaking.

3. Sometimes, using the Control/Character/Paragraph/Properties Panels puts you in a third condition of override. Many of us refer to this a locally-applied and/or directly-applied and/or user-applied formatting attributes. This third condition overrides both the Character Style and the essential, hard-working Paragraph Style on your text that is selected with the Type tool.

So, if you want to fundamentally work by means of Paragraph Styles (and you should), then make sure the Character Styles panel is defaulted to None, and also avoid reaching for the Control/Character/Paragraph/Properties panels to directly apply formatting to any selected text.

As InDesign doesn't have 'style sheets' — a feature of some other layout apps I sometimes wish was supported — I can't quite make sense of your question.

A carefully developed layout will use unmodified styles throughout. In practice, any complex layout will probably have a few overrides here and there (most often in things like 'fitting' book text). But if you're setting up styles and then having to override some majority of them... you aren't really doing things right.

Feel free to explain your position in more detail.

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

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