This is making me crazy. In PageMaker I had a method of formatting text for catalogs my company issues of about 160 pages. PageMaker worked beautifully in doing this. I would place my text from a Word document where I have created italics, bold, small caps – whatever. On placing the text into my master document in indesign, the styles of the fonts were always retained. I would do a global paragraph style that I call authortitle to take care of part of each of the items in the catalog. After applying that style all of my font styles were retained, and if I apply that global style inindesign, all of my font styles are still retained. I would include a special character such as a backslash or @# which I would then search for in PageMaker and replace that backslash or whatever with a single blank space with the character style of specialabstract, for example. All my font styles in PageMaker were still retained, but in indesign I lose all my font styles. I have tried everything I can think of to approach this problem, but it remains a problem – a very big and time consuming problem, When you consider that there may be up to 250 items in the catalog.
The one difference I can see between the criteria that you have to enter to search for and change in PageMaker versus indesign is that PageMaker would not make you include a style for a font. And I wonder if this is where the problem lies. I have been trying to figure this out for years. What my method has been, which may sound ridiculous, but it’s worked, is to have an old computer available that can still run PageMaker 7, because Windows 7 and beyond will not run PageMaker, I’m very sorry to say. I use PageMaker to do the initial set up of finding the special characters and replacing them with paragraph styles. It takes me less than five minutes to do what would take me many hours to do manually, one paragraph at a time, in indesign. It’s a real pill having to have an old computer available to be able to run PageMaker, and I would really like to be able to do all of this in indesign. Can anyone help me with this? I would so appreciate it!
I have tried running the DeJongh script or whatever it’s called that preserves styles, and that doesn’t help either. When I look at my document initially in indesign and put the cursor in an italicized word and look at the character style attributes, it will say italics, so indesign is seeing these things as italics. That’s not the problem. The problem seems to be when applying a paragraph style that forces you to put something in that style box such as regular, italics, semibold, or whatever, the style that was there is removed and it all becomes regular. I am using either Janson or Adobe caslon, both of which have an italics style as part of the font set. I hope I have made my predicament clear. Please let me know if I have not. Thank you!
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