I’ve been sitting here for hours trying to do this with character styles. It helps in italics and small caps, they are preserved. But I have also been using double French brackets to be able to change certain blank line spaces to a smaller point size within an item. Never a problem with pagemaker, of course. Indesign is fighting me every step of the way with this. I can get it to reduce the double French brackets to the 5 point size that I need, but as soon as I remove the French brackets, which are only there as a symbol to find, it reverts back to a larger point size. And I’m specifying in find and change that it’s to be 5 points.

Another big issue is most of the items in the catalog have a headline that is centered and italicized. In PageMaker I would have the preceding symbol in each headline, which is a left French bracket, replaced with my paragraph style for the headline, which is in italics. In indesign the headline becomes centered, but it is not italicized.

Going through all of this in thinking of the number of times I would have to do this and every catalog, it’s just beyond comprehension. An incredible waste of time. If anyone has more ideas, I very much appreciate it. I dread to think what will happen if I can no longer use PageMaker even on an old computer. Things were so simple then. I don’t know why there’s so much difficulty with indesign. This is extremely frustrating, especially on a Sunday. But thank you so much for the suggestion of character styles.