Changing the fonts in multiple paragraph styles

[Gary_Newman@adobeforums.com]

An InDesign document has many paragraph styles that use font A. I want to change all instances of font A to font B. Find Font does this for the document, but the Styles keep the original font settings, so they can no longer be used. Is there a way I can universally change all the styles so that all calls for font A become font B?

[Bob Levine]

Try the scripting forum, but note that this is what the "based on"
setting in paragraph styles is for. Change one and they all change.

Bob

[Anne-Marie Concepcion]

I wrote a *relatively* quick way to do this via Find Font and Redefine Style here:

<http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/dgarchives/designgeek35.php>

And ever since having to do that for a few docs, I try to always create a base paragraph style or two (base-body, base-heads, etc.) in my docs on which I base the regular styles that I actually apply to text. That way I just need to change the font in my base styles if/when the situation occurs that I need to change a typeface throughout.

So for example:
Para Style "base-body" -- based on No Style, typeface is changed to the one I want for body text
Para Style "body" -- based on "base-body" with specifics for leading, first line indents etc.
Para Style "body-first" -- based on "body" with no indent and 3-line drop cap
Para Style "body-caption" (or just "caption") -- based on "body" with no indent, smaller face/leading
Para Style "bullet" -- based on "body" with hanging indent, nested style for bullet etc.
Para Style "bullet-first" -- based on "bullet" with extra space above

.... and so on. I do the same type of cascading based-on styles for other major typefaces, so I create "base-heads" and maybe "base-tables" and so on.

To change the typeface throughout for a particular "class" of text, I just need to change the one in the base-[whatever] style. All other styles related to it change just their typeface and nothing else.

All this is only necessary when you think you might be changing the typeface of your publication at some point, of course. We mainly do one-offs ... unique pubs ... so it's an invaluable timesaver when clients want to see iterations using different typefaces.

AM