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Hello!
So I am trying to clean up the paragraph styles in my document, and after doing an audit of all of the text in the document I've narrowed down to a list of styles that are no where to be found. However, when I click "select unused styles," the ones that aren't in my doc aren't selected. When I go to the Find Format tool, there are 0 instances of those styles in my document. But if I try to delete the styles, I get met with a warning. Whats going on? I can't figure out where these styles are being used, and I desperately need to clean up the styles in this document. Any and all answers greatly appreciated! Please help me find the poltergeist in my doc!
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You can always delete them and when the warning appears, simply change them to "Basic Paragraph" or whatever style is the equivalent of your "body text" style.
Hard to say why it's happening, sounds like "gunk" to use the technical term. 😊
You could always try saving the file out as .idml, by doing a Save As and choosing the format for CS4 IDML. Then re-open the file and see if the unused styles get properly selected for deletion.
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Your recommendation is dangerous:
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Thank you! I actually followed this advice and haven't seen any issues, yet. We shall see. It seems as if there are lots of little nit-picky styles creating chaos in my files. So annoying!
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Those paragraph or character styles might be in use by other styles which are based on them. Never delete those styles or you will get a mess.
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Good to know, thank you! I'm just having a hard time finding where the styles are used by other styles. I've been looking for a script to do it for me, but no luck. Any idea how to see what is being used where? I tried the format finder but it isn't giving me any results.
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Make a copy of the document. Work here now. Do some nonsense to the styles you do not find anywhere, like a color causing eye cancer. If another style is inheriting this property it is dependend from this style.
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Your doc may be carrying what I call "invisible overrides." ID may not report them, but they're still there. I discovered this while working on an epub. To see overrides, click the view overrides toggle on the paragraph menu. It's the icon to the left of the lightning bolt.
You may be surprised by the inadvertent overrides you find. Preflight can also find them.
-j
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Oh! That's actually good to know. I never really understood what that little icon meant, and didn't want to run the risk of screwing something up by clicking it. I'll try that out. Thank you!
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Agree with comments by Willi and Nedlaw. I had not thought about the based on issue, especially if you did not create the file originally. If the leading the styles is causing quirky things to happen, you could make the "colorful "style Willie mentions and change the styles you want to get rid of to that. That will show you any based on relationships pretty quickly.
with all this going on, it's still wouldn't be a bad idea to save it out to .idml just to clean it up
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"deleting" the styles 🙂
(Reply edit function not behaving)