Here’s what I’ve done (which is my process for dozens of books done in the past):
I imported the text without mapping styles.
I ran a search and replace to find all italic text and replace with an italic character style.
I then applied the body text style to all the text via control+A. (I format the chapter number and header later using GREP find and change.)
Usually that does the trick and if I see there are problems, I clear the overrides (this is a straight text kids novel).

What is happening here is that character style is applying to text that wasn’t italic to begin with!
When I select the text, it has the italic character style applied to it AND the paragraph style has a plus. When I clear the override, it just changes the font (all italic text is coming out in Times New Roman instead of the font I chose) but remains italic.

Silly me – I didn’t realize there was a Javascript version as well. That worked like a charm.
Thanks David – I knew I could count on you!

I figured out that when you are WFH and your kids are on vacation and you have a bad head cold, you download the wrong files but reference the correct ones.
So in short, I was bringing in files with no bleed the client had originally sent.

::blushing::

I had a deadline, so I ended up doing it manually, table by table.
But the format is as described above – column one of the table in French, column two in English.

I am wondering if Annotations didn’t work because the table was grouped with an image…

Just to add on a detail:
this only happens on pages that have an indented style that includes a span in order to keep paragraph together and insert some space before and after the group of paragraphs to which the indented style is applies.

Thanks for taking the time to try it out and reply.
I had found that article and followed the instructions.

I was changing the style name incorrectly ::blushing::

But now I’m getting a java script error 21 that the problem is with the following line
myParas[i].parentTextFrames[0].parentPage.appliedMaster = myDocument.masterSpreads.item(“B-Master”);

I tried
1. changing “B-Master”to my master name. I assumed I was supposed to keep the letter heading. Mine also is B so I wrote it as “B-chapterpage”
2. When that didn’t work, I changed the name of my master back to B-Master and reset that part of the script to the original, changing only the style name.

And I’m getting that error. What am I doing wrong?

This is what my personalized script now looks like:

var myDocument = app.activeDocument;
var myParas = myDocument.stories.everyItem().paragraphs.everyItem().getElements();
var myPage = myDocument.pages;
for(i=0; i<myParas.length; i++)
{
if(myParas[i].appliedParagraphStyle.name == “chapternumber”)
{
//Works only in CS5 and later
myParas[i].parentTextFrames[0].parentPage.appliedMaster = myDocument.masterSpreads.item(“B-Master”);
//for CS4 use this
//myParas[i].parentTextFrames[0].parent.appliedMaster = myDocument.masterSpreads.item(“B-Master”);
}
}

Interesting! Thanks for sharing, Khalid.
I will try that next time it comes up in a job.

Ah, I’ll do a no break. Thanks (perhaps more hours of sleep at night would allow for such simple solutions to enter my brain as well…)

But I was more wondering about the inconsistency as to what is happening on the first page of the chapter and on the rest of the pages.
I’ve used soft returns before and have never had a problem where it rendered differently on different pages of the same chapter….