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• • February 9, 2017 at 8:37 am #92084
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Hello,

    IN SHORT:
    I am an InDesign beginner, working on InDesign CC 2015.
    A couple weeks ago I took on a project lead by another worker who left: so I’m discovering the InDesign file I’ll be working with for the next years.

    We basically have a book of almost 1,400 pages (a Bible), made of 69 InDesign documents.
    I just fixed an issue we had in one of this InDesign documents by creating a character style which only exists in 1 of the 69 InDesign documents. I need your help to assess whether my solution to the issue is going to create a different one which I cannot see yet. i heard that exceptions are usually not good, and that we want uniformity across all documents making an InDesign book.

    DETAILED:
    The issue appeared after that we made corrections to the Proverbs chapter of our Bible which contains . The corrections were made in Word and imported into InDesign. The importation went fine for the 31 chapters of Proverbs. But for some reason I ignore because I’m not the one who did it, 1 of this 31 parts didn’t correctly apply the paragraph style we wanted. A + sign appeared next to our paragraph style to notify us there was some paragraph settings overriding ou standard paragraphe style.

    That’s when I took on the project, and had to fix the paragraph style issue in chapter 17 of Proverbs. When I simply tried to apply our standard paragraph style, it worked. Except that all words in italics disappeared, which is really bad for us. I checked and realized there was character style existing for Italic words. So I created one with the CTRL + F command, I searched for all words in italics and applied a new character style to them for Italics. I then applied the standard character style and that solved the formatting issue while conserving the words in italics.

    Though, now the character style for italics only exists for this particular InDesign documents, which is the Proverbs. The other 68 InDesign documents which make up our InDesign book don’t have this character style, because we never needed it so far. How is this “exception” going to impact our book, including our table of content which detect content based on the styles we have (I dont understand this part, but that’s what I was told).

    Our book being so big, it would be such a headache to create invisible problems while trying to fix issues: we cannot afford that to happen. So I please need an expert look on this, with recommendations, warnings, and maybe even solutions.

  • February 9, 2017 at 9:20 am #92085
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    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).

  • February 9, 2017 at 10:08 am #92086
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Thank you David for answering so quickly, that’s a relief !

    Yes, you guessed right, I did forget the key word “NOT” in my sentence.

    And yes we’ll be printing this year, and also exporting to EPUB.
    So if I understand correctly, I better have the same character styles across all our InDesign documents so it will properly export to EPUB or HTML.

    Thanks for the tip about the Find/Change command. If I got it, when I use “All Documents”, it will find all words in Italic in all the documents which are currently OPEN. Is it correct ?

    Is there other trap / tip related to my first question which I should know about ?

  • February 9, 2017 at 10:59 am #92087
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Yes, Find/Change “all documents” is only the currently-open documents. But I think I would do it in groups of maybe 10… I don’t think I would trust it with 69 files at the same time!

    There are only 66 books in the Bible, right? So I guess you have front matter in one… and maybe 2 others?

    Can you email me directly at david @ indesignsecets.com with a screen capture of some of the pages of the bible? I am researching how InDesign users create Bibles and other religious texts.

  • February 9, 2017 at 1:30 pm #92093
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Great ! Thanks for the advise about doing it by groups of 10.

    I just sent you an email with screenshots; please let me know if you need clarification because it’s all in french.

    If that would be possible, I wonder one more thing:
    Could the character style for italics I created have an effect on our table of content, which recognizes the different books based on a specific character style each book title is associated to ?

    I havent taken a course yet on Lynda.com about building table of content (so I dont know much about it), although I intend to.

  • February 13, 2017 at 8:57 am #92160
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Thank you again for all the help. I’m not sure my last question about our table of content is making sense, if not please let me know I can try to explain it differently.

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