Recently I wrote for InDesignSecrets.com an article about InDesign CS3’s ability to Find/Change object formatting attributes. That post sparked a discussion that included other new features of Find/Change, whether CS3 would be able to co-exist with installations of CS and CS2, and how to clear style overrides in both InDesign CS2 and CS3. It’s this last topic I want to talk about in this article.
On that site, reader Ed F. asked:
What I’m looking for is [an automated] way to find text that is styled with a specified Paragraph Style and then over-ridden (possibly due to an import error), and revert it to the desired Paragraph Style. Neither Find Font nor the new Find/Change appear to be able to do this directly.
The inimitable Anne-Marie Concepcion answered with:
Clear Overrides can fix the problem once it’s found. But Ed wants Find/Change to find them, and Find Format doesn’t have that option. (â€Find Format: Body Style plus extra manual formatting of any type.â€) He might want to use Find/Change because he wants to take care of all instances of local overrides in a style in a big document … but Clear Overrides can only work a spread at a time, at most.
Ed, you can do what you’re asking already, in CS2.
Find/Change has a “featurenotabug†in that it automatically clears overrides (which some people don’t like, but works great in your situation) whenever you specify a Paragraph Style in the Change Format area. So say text styled with “Body Copy†paragraph style is all wonky throughout your doc because of various kinds of local formatting. To fix, go to Find/Change and set it to run through the Document. Leave the Find/Change fields empty but click the More Options button to open the Format fields. In Find Format, set it to find Paragraph Style: Body Copy. In Change Format, set it to find the same thing, Paragraph Style: Body copy. Then click Change All–voila, all local formatting is stripped from paragraphs styled with Body Copy.
If there is some local formatting you want to keep, be sure to use Character Styles for those…the Find/Change thing won’t clear out Character Style formatting without a bit of extra work.
Sagacious advice, particularly the caveat in the last paragraph, which is where I want to pick up the discussion.
Local Text Overrides
Any time you clear overrides on a paragraph style, all formating options not specifically described in the paragraph style, a character style, or in a style on which either is based, disappear. If you’ve italicized, emboldened, underlined, or struckthrough any words or phrases, those all revert to unadorned Roman/regular text when you clear overrides.
While I think your advice is very good, I would go one step further and make the naming of the character style less specific.
Usually I call my italic & bold character styles emphasis and strong respectively. The main reason for doing it that way? What if you (or your boss/supervisor) decide later in the workflow that you want to emphasize passages of text by color and not font-style?
I know you could easily change the character style at that point but I just think it’s a good workflow habit, especially when working with lots of other folks. It also makes easier for those of us with one foot in the print world and the other on the web.
On another point, I strongly disagree that Adobe or Quark should provide default character styles. I hate the Basic Paragraph style enough as it is, plus if I want defaults character styles I can create when no documents are open.
Thanks for the feedback, Rene.
Clearly, I’m like you, one of those with a foot in each of the print publishing and Web publishing worlds. I have to say, though, I’ve never liked the EM (for emphasis) and STRONG tags, and I’ve been working in HTML since before they were introduced. Renaming Italics to Emphasis is to limit a 500 year old innovation only one of its uses in printed communications.
Italics, as I mentioned in my article, are used in written English to correctly set the name of self-contained titles like book, film, television show, play, magazine, and Website titles. They’re also used to identify certain types of proper names such as ship, boat, and other vessel names. There is no inherent emphasis in a book title or a ship’s name, so in XHTML, where every tag is part of a logical description of the content structure, why would you identify a a book title or a ship’s name has having EMphasis? We’re not allowed to use <I> for italics any longer, so if you want to type a book title but with no particular emphasis of voice, which tag should you use? Should you wrap it in a SPAN and give it a class named ProperTitle or NonEmphasisItalics? The W3C requires that all mentions of such titles or names be wrapped in EMphasis HTML tags–if one wishes to adhere to proper grammar, that is. Clearly, the W3C didn’t think through its decision to replace <I> with <EM>. The replacement of <B> with <STRONG> was similarly myopic.
I could go on at length about why EMphasis and STRONG are obviously ignorant and arrogant choices on the part of the learned members of the W3C, but in this publication, focussed on print applications, workflows, and professionals, such a conversation would be far out of place. Maybe we should continue it on Designorati sometime.
I see your point, but I hope you can also see mine. The problem of common formatting like italics and bold being too easily erased with a quick ALT-click on the Paragraph Styles panel may be miniscule or enormous, depending on the individual creative and her work. I believe the software makers should provide some type of solution, and I offered two suggestions. Perhaps the best way is something I haven’t thought of. Regardless of the proffered ideas, the way the software works creates a problem that can and should be solved, by somebody, somehow, soon.
Adobe and Quark have not provided a solution yet, which makes more work for users. Granted, each time isn’t much work, but the act of highlighting text and assigning a character style–even with Quick Apply–is a significant distraction from the writing. Any time you have to break your concentration away from creating and styling content to think about the software, the software maker has failed to do its job.
Hey Pariah, great article. One problem I see with creating default character styles for bold and italic etc. is they’re prone to fall apart depending on the typeface. For example, applying the Bold char style to text styled with anything in the numbered Univers family (45 Light, 55 Roman, etc.) will result in the dreaded pinking, applying the Italic char style to fonts with two or more weights (light, regular, heavy) often results in the wrong Italic being applied, and so on.
Still, if it falls apart using Character Styles, it would have fallen apart using the keyboard shortcuts too. (With the exception of Helvetica … ID knows that applying Italic to Helvetia means you want Helvetica Oblique. There may be others.) I would recommend that the designers (not the editors using InCopy) create specific character styles for applying the correct bold/heavy etc. as appropriate to the typefaces used in the body text.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a script that would automatically convert local formatting to these sorts of Character Styles? I found this long thread that contains a number of them, if you don’t mind cutting/pasting text into a text file and saving it as a script:
Pariah one other thing. I was arguing (friendly argument) with a web design freelancer of mine that bold and italic were deprecated by the w3c long ago; replaced with strong and em. He didn’t believe me … sigh … but I could not for the life of me find the page on the w3c.org site that definitively said this. Do you have a URL?
thanks,
the inimitable and sagacious Anne-Marie ;-)
hmmm my post lost the link to the thread. Let me try this little “link” button
here
okay I give up. Here it is as plain text, remove the space after the colon and the return after cgi-bin/
http: //www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/
webx?128@@.3bc1cee8
Can’t resist one more try of the link button!
Thread about scripts
Very interesting read. My only concern with wanting manual bolds and italics is for secondary use in XML. At our company, we use Quark (soon to transition to InDesign). When things are manually bolded and italicized, in XML those characters show up as bold or italic and can be manipulated for our purposes. Our tests so far in InDesign no longer show us when the bold/italics are there, because the font information is stripped out. Is there a fix for that? Or some way InDesign can tell us? We’re using character-level styles as you suggest, but I’m having problems getting an italic character style to stick, since some of our fonts use “Oblique”. I’m using InDesign CS2. Your site is always very helpful and informative, so thanks for letting me vent!
I don’t know if anyone can help me on this, but I have a client who has word documents with embeded html code which determines if a word is bold or italic. They want to import that text into Quark WITHOUT loosing the text format. I have never heard of this and am pretty sure that whenever you import into quark, it strips the font and assigns it the default. Please help me if anyone knows how this is supposed to. They are on pc.