keithk said:

Any thoughts? Pros/cons?

I'd stick with Word as that format is easier to transfer to other users in the case of an emergency (Editor is ill, someone must pinch-hit) or in the case that the files are sent outside the company for some other purpose (licensed to a foreign-language publisher.)

hank_scorpio said:

Post edited 4:09 am – November 18, 2009 by hank_scorpio

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I don't do shortnames for styles, because others have to work on my files, so it would be unfair to them to have them guess what BUC or something is, and I have to think about what way I leave the files for when I'm no longer working here (I will be here, but not forever ) )

Ah yes, one of my roles at the company I'm at is to maintain the training documents for our freelancers… so all that stuff is documented. :-)

Freelancer quote that made me bang my head on my desk: “Oh, you and all your styles!” — said after I explained to them that to achieve a certain visual effect, I wanted them to format a paragraph with a paragraph style, and some words within it as character style. I spent more time fixing that book than it would have taken me to build it myself.

hank_scorpio said:

Post edited 4:09 am – November 18, 2009 by hank_scorpio

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I don't do shortnames for styles, because others have to work on my files, so it would be unfair to them to have them guess what BUC or something is, and I have to think about what way I leave the files for when I'm no longer working here (I will be here, but not forever ) )

Ah yes, one of my roles at the company I'm at is to maintain the training documents for our freelancers… so all that stuff is documented. :-)

Freelancer quote that made me bang my head on my desk: “Oh, you and all your styles!” — said after I explained to them that to achieve a certain visual effect, I wanted them to format a paragraph with a paragraph style, and some words within it as character style. I spent more time fixing that book than it would have taken me to build it myself.

In general, I try (but don't always succeed) to avoid naming paragraph and character styles with a description of what they look like, and instead go for a description of their function. That way, if you end up changing the formatting, you don't also have to go through and rename the styles. I think this is easier to explain to someone else, too — “Use the 'Example' style” as opposed to “use the 'Green text in Gill Sans' style.”

There are a few abbreviations that I commonly use: NI for No Indent, BUC for Bold Until Colon, SB for Sidebar. I use those as suffixes, so 'body text' could become 'body text NI' or 'body text NI BUC' — those break my 'describe the function' rule, but I think 'body text with tertiary header' is even more unwieldy. ;-)

hank_scorpio has just saved the collective InDesign community roughly 4 billion hours. Thank you, Hank!

I've used Thomas' Fix Paragraph Style Pairs script with great success, and did a videocast to demonstrate usage and some “gotchas” with it: https://dirtywords.tv/2009/episode_004/

I'm pretty sure that it can handle all three situations you described — it will require making extra styles, still, but automatically applying them will make things faster and more accurate.

I work for a small (less than 10 employees, total) publisher of board, card, and roleplaying games. I design books, do grunt production on others, hire freelancers, train freelancers (apparently long document production is much more of a black art to some people than I ever expected …), build ads and convention display stuff, and do some web design.

Most of my time is spent in CS4, now, with trips back to CS3 for legacy projects and touchups on stuff that freelancers with CS3 have.

I work with elves-with-guns and giant robots and other fantastical stuff everyday, and it's awesome.