Paragraph Styles

[olive_and_finch]

Hi,

I'm new to using paragraph styles and have 2 questions:

1) When you delete a paragraph style, is it per the document you are working in, or does it delete the style from all your documents? I do not understand how these are saved/linked. Everytime I draw a new textbox, it uses the "basic paragraph" setting and I want it to be the settings I created for my specific document.

2) I was editing the paragraph justification settings and could not find the Full Justify/Align Bottom line left setting anywhere. Where can I find this? 

[John Mensinger · Accepted solution]

1) Your Paragraph Styles in a given document are specific to that document. You can "Load" (import) styles from one document to another, but deleting styles can only affect the document from which you delete them.

2) Edit the Paragraph Style and look at Indents and Spacing > Alignment [menu]

[Bill Silbert · Accepted solution]

If you want a custom style to replace the basic paragraph style as the default you can do so by editing the basic style so that it has the attributes you wish. You can do this by double clicking on the basic paragraph style in the Paragraph Panel and then changing everything through the Paragraph Style Options dialog that appears. If you were to do this with no document open and then quit the program the new basic paragpraph style you created would become the dafault for all new documents that you created. However, I don't really recommend this. It would probably be fine as long as all of your InDesign work was confined to just one computer. The problem that you would run into would be when your files are opened on other computers. You would then run into conflicting basic paragraph styles which would have to be resolved each time. This would especially be an issue if you had to copy and paste text from one of your documents into a new document on the second computer. The basic paragraph style on that computer's InDesign would override your version. Paragraph Styles can be applied globally by entering a specific attribute of the text in the "Find Format" area of Find/Change and changed to any previously created Paragraph or Character Style in the "Change Format" area. In this case you would not enter any text at all in the "Find What:" and "Change To:" areas. 

[Creamer Training · Accepted solution]

Assuming you created your paragraph style with a document open, and later you delete that style, it will affect only that document. 

If you create styles with NO document open, they will be in any new document but not existing ones. However, deletion will still be per document if a document is open. If the style has be actually used on text in the document, a dialog box will ask you what style you want to replace it with. 

To change the default paragraph style in a document, switch to the Selection tool (black arrow), deselect any object, click on the desired style. It will become the default for that document (only). 

Left to right alignment is part of the paragaph style; it is under the Indents and Spacing section. However, you mention align bottom, so if you mean vertical alignment, that is an object-based setting. It would be the Text Frame Options under the Object menu. You can use an Object style for this setting.