Reply To: Side effects of caracter style in a book

Johanna, your message says you “realized there was character style” but I think you mean you realized there was NOT a character style… so you created one, yes?

That is a great solution. Using a character style for italic words is the proper way to handle this. And, as you know, you can then apply a new paragraph style without losing the italic words.
It is similar to this tip:
https://creativepro.com/import-word-files-into-indesign-remove-local-formatting-but-keep-italics-and-bold.php

It would be best if the other 68 documents also had an italic character style and used that for all italic words. That would ensure consistency. However, if that is too much work and you are only going to be printing the book, then it is probably okay if some documents use the character style and some do not.

I say “print” because if you are going to be exporting to EPUB or HTML then you do need to be very strict and consistent with those character styles!

One way to copy the character style to all the documents is to open a bunch of the files at the same time and use Find/Change (just like you did with the one document, but use All Documents).