Remove all paragraph and character style overrides

[jaime_ash@adobeforums.com]

Does InDesign CS have a quick way to remove all paragraph and character style overrides throughout a document?

[Jens Schulze]

> Does InDesign CS have a quick way to remove all paragraph

> and character style overrides throughout a document?

There is no native function for this, but it can be archived through the
scripting interface. You should ask in the adobe.scripting.indesign
newsgroup/forum if there is anyone that may help you write a script. I bet
Dave already have a suitable platform-independent Javascript for this
problem in his magical sourcecode book.

Jens

[Sharon_Hipp@adobeforums.com]

Create a style of your choosing that has no formatting in it. Select all your imported text, press Ctrl+Alt and your new style. That strips it of everything and you are ready to go.

[mikewitherell_at_jetsetcom_dot_net]

Ready to go broke, you mean. Sharon, you don't won't to zero out all the formatting. You want to cook the formatting down to only the paragraph styles while not having any direct formatting nor any character styles. Not so easy to do.

Mike Witherell in Washington DC

[Marilyn_Langfeld@adobeforums.com]

Well, I was hoping someone would have a script for you. I don't, not exactly. But I do have one that Dave Saunders wrote for Mac InDesign (see his website <http://www.pdsassoc.com> for more information). I'm sure someone here could base a Windows-compatible script on it (or maybe Dave could upgrade it to Javascript). So here it is:

tell application "InDesign CS"
set myStyles to every paragraph style of document 1
set find preferences to nothing
set change preferences to nothing
set myStyles to rest of myStyles -- dump "No Style"
repeat with myStyle in myStyles
search document 1 for "" replacing with "" with find attributes {applied paragraph style:myStyle} with change attributes {applied paragraph style:myStyle}
end repeat
end tell

Here's what I normally do with an imported Word document. First I run a script that deletes double para returns, double tabs, para return followed by word space, double space. Then I look for italics, superscripts, bold italics, etc. I use find/replace to change them to appropriate character styles I've created for this purpose.

If I'm working with a Word document I've set up for my magazine client, they have already done some basic para styling. So I just run the script above to get rid of the + signs. If not, I just select all, style all paras as body, then run through the document setting other styles as needed. Then I can run the script to get rid of any remaining local formatting.

[Unregistered]

You can do this one style at a time with the Find/Change function in the edit menu.

From the Find/Change dialog, select the Style you want to clear all overrides from in both the Find format and the Change format box.

I can't see any years on the question or answers above, but it's now October 2011 and I'm using InDesign CS5.