This blog post is half-tip and half-plea. It has to do with a particular problem some people have with nested styles: You can’t easily convert them to real, localy-formatted character styles — you know, styles that show up as applied to the text in the Character Style panel.
For example, let’s say you need to export a story in RTF format for someone to read in MS Word. The story has run-in headings created with nested styles. You export the story but all the runin heads disappear! Word doesn’t have nested styles, after all. So how can you convert the nested styles into actual character styles?
I am almost sure that I saw a script to do this somewhere in the past year. But I cannot find any evidence of it. So I queried a few likely suspects, but no one has found it yet. If you know of a script (or feel like writing one) email me or post a comment below.
In the meantime, I did learn one awesome trick to achieve this result from author and trainer Jim Maivald. I suggest saving your document before trying this, so that you can revert back to the proper nested styles at the end.
First, open the Tags panel, click the New Tag button and give the tag a name, such as “nestedstyle”
Next, choose Map Styles to Tags from the Tags panel menu. Choose the name of your new tag in the right column, next to the character style name.
After you click OK, choose Map Tags to Styles and choose your character style name from the right column, next to the tag name.
When you click OK, the text that had been styled via nested styles will now be tagged with real character styles. And if you export the story as RTF, you’ll see the styles!
Obviously, that script (wherever it is) is going to be more efficient. But isn’t it cool that you can co-opt the XML tagging features for this workaround?
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on April 17, 2009
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