Your suggestion: "Note to software developers: it would be extremely handy to be able to strip out all local formatting except italics. Even more handy and flexible would be an interface where you could choose which characteristics, whether style or local formatting, to import and which to ignore."
A solution exists for QuarkXPress in the form of Stylin', from Vision's Edge (http://www.visionsedge.com/). This $49 XTension lets you apply a new style without losing your favorite attributes that are already applied to the text. You can choose to keep any combination of paragraph or character attributes, such as font styles, tracking, color, space-before and -after, alignment, etc. Once you define a combination of attributes you want to keep, you can save that as a Setting for future use.
Submitted by Jay J Nelson on Wed, 08/29/2007 - 13:59.
Mr. Barry mentions "...exporting a set of styles from InDesign, tweaking them in Word..." -- I'd love to find out how to do this. Currently we're using trial & error to make Word styles dovetail into our InDesign templates, and working backwards this way would be excellent. Anybody got advice?
Submitted by funderburk on Tue, 05/15/2007 - 05:27.
Well done John for addressing this common problem. I used to be surprised when I found people who didn't know about styles, but now I'm used to it.
I've become good at doing quick demos that make people want to learn styles (I think it's when they realise they've done days of overtime reformatting large documents that they see how useful styles are). Anyone who's worked on a large document can instantly see the benefits when you demonstrate how easily you can globally reformat it.
I generally create Word templates for writers/keyboardists, with styles in place. This lets me create styles that automatically switch (back to text after subhead for instance). This really excites people and gets them using the styles. For my own writing I connect Word styles to the function keys on my Mac, then label these with Post-It tape. I don't do this for other people in case they use the function keys. [Note to Adobe - why not free up the definition of keystrokes for styles in InDesign? I like using my function keys; others like using their numeric keyboard]
Because Word has a slew of its own styles, which you can't delete, I start all my styles with an asterisk. This keeps them all grouped together and ensures I (or my co-writers) use the right styles.
One thing I'd strongly recommend is that you never, ever use the Normal style - even for regular word processing. Because all the other preset styles are dependent on it, a stray "Normal" can drive you crazy. So I normally build my Word document styles from a "*Body" style, which I make the starting default in my templates.
Word also has an irritating 'helpful' feature that automatically assigns styles when someone uses local formatting. Turn this off.
Using the leading asterisk (or bullet, hyphen, whatever) makes the imported styles easy to spot in InDesign or Quark style lists. They can then be mapped through to the publication's final styles.
Hope this is a useful addition to the arsenal!
Submitted by David Glover on Tue, 02/13/2007 - 10:12.
A solution to keeping italics
Your suggestion: "Note to software developers: it would be extremely handy to be able to strip out all local formatting except italics. Even more handy and flexible would be an interface where you could choose which characteristics, whether style or local formatting, to import and which to ignore."
A solution exists for QuarkXPress in the form of Stylin', from Vision's Edge (http://www.visionsedge.com/). This $49 XTension lets you apply a new style without losing your favorite attributes that are already applied to the text. You can choose to keep any combination of paragraph or character attributes, such as font styles, tracking, color, space-before and -after, alignment, etc. Once you define a combination of attributes you want to keep, you can save that as a Setting for future use.
"working smart"
Mr. Barry mentions "...exporting a set of styles from InDesign, tweaking them in Word..." -- I'd love to find out how to do this. Currently we're using trial & error to make Word styles dovetail into our InDesign templates, and working backwards this way would be excellent. Anybody got advice?
Some more style thoughts
Well done John for addressing this common problem. I used to be surprised when I found people who didn't know about styles, but now I'm used to it.
I've become good at doing quick demos that make people want to learn styles (I think it's when they realise they've done days of overtime reformatting large documents that they see how useful styles are). Anyone who's worked on a large document can instantly see the benefits when you demonstrate how easily you can globally reformat it.
I generally create Word templates for writers/keyboardists, with styles in place. This lets me create styles that automatically switch (back to text after subhead for instance). This really excites people and gets them using the styles. For my own writing I connect Word styles to the function keys on my Mac, then label these with Post-It tape. I don't do this for other people in case they use the function keys. [Note to Adobe - why not free up the definition of keystrokes for styles in InDesign? I like using my function keys; others like using their numeric keyboard]
Because Word has a slew of its own styles, which you can't delete, I start all my styles with an asterisk. This keeps them all grouped together and ensures I (or my co-writers) use the right styles.
One thing I'd strongly recommend is that you never, ever use the Normal style - even for regular word processing. Because all the other preset styles are dependent on it, a stray "Normal" can drive you crazy. So I normally build my Word document styles from a "*Body" style, which I make the starting default in my templates.
Word also has an irritating 'helpful' feature that automatically assigns styles when someone uses local formatting. Turn this off.
Using the leading asterisk (or bullet, hyphen, whatever) makes the imported styles easy to spot in InDesign or Quark style lists. They can then be mapped through to the publication's final styles.
Hope this is a useful addition to the arsenal!