Find/Change Styles to the Rescue

Mr. X worked as the final stop in a publication workflow that involved nine layout artists, each working on different portions of a 320-page quarterly. His job was to collect and proof everyone’s work, stitch it all together into a single publication managed by an InDesign book, and fix any mistakes before imposing the issue and sending it to press. Ofcourse, the publication had a style guide, templates, and preconfigured paragraph and character styles; invariably, however, the articles and sections Mr. X received from the other creatives contained numerous style overrides in the form of local formatting—all of which Mr. X had to fix before the publication went to press. Making matters worse, the publication also ran per issue anywhere between 1 and 10 articles and pieces of articles from outside agencies and filler libraries. The outside contributions were formatted in ways that rarely bore any resemblance to Mr. X’s templates.
Wrangling these wild styles should have been as easy as selecting paragraphs and applying or reapplying paragraph styles. Unfortunately, doing so cleared out desired overrides, most notably italic. Consequently, Mr. X found himself spending days staring at side-by-side comparisons of original pages and pages with correct paragraph styles, locating italicized words in the former, and manually italicizing the same words in the latter. The process took so long that Mr. X had to push up the issue closing date—which, of course, some members of the team understood to mean more time between submission and press for making last-minute rewrites, leading to more formatting cleanup and often on the same story more than once.
The real solution to Mr. X’s problem lay with stricter enforcement of the publication’s style guide, which was in the offing but still left Mr. X with a lot of extra work in the interim. Although style enforcement might improve the consistency of work from Mr. X’s coworkers, policy changes for content from external agencies wasn’t likely to improve as quickly as internal policy changes. By way of retaining Mr. X’s direct control over fixing the publication, there is a two-step solution.
First, Mr. X should identify all the formatting options that fell under the heading of “desired override”— in other words, any appropriately used character-level formatting such as italic, a couple of different underline and coloring styles used for assorted kinds of URLs listed in stories, and small caps for acronyms and occasional other uses. Mr. X should create character styles to hold each of the settings—one for small caps, one each for the types of URLs, one each for italic, bold-italic. Mr. X also should create a Regular character style that specifically disallowed all the formatting options of all the other character styles; using the Regular style would instantly strip off the effects of, say, the bold-italic style, reverting the selected text to non-bold, non-italic. Mr. X should add these styles to the main template.
Step two is building and enacting a procedure to replace wanted style overrides with character styles and then remove all unwanted overrides. No sweat. Using Find/Change (Edit > Find/Change), Mr. X should search for any italic glyph and assigned it to the Italic character style. You see those settings in the screenshot of the Find/Change dialog. Similar searches were run for each of the other format overrides that had matching character styles. Each replacement criteria set was saved as a reusable query.

To revert undesirable overrides back to their correct paragraph styles, additional searches were performed, one for each paragraph style. In that case, it was even simpler: both Find Format and Change Format were set to the same paragraph style and no other options.

When InDesign performs a Find/Change with such criteria, it automatically strips off any overrides—but not those properly assigned to character styles. So, to remove any unwanted overrides on the Body Copy style, Mr. X set the Find Format to search for Paragraph Style: Body Copy; the Change Format was also set to only Paragraph Style:
Body Copy. InDesign rolled through all the stories in the document, finding every instance of text in the Body Copy style, and force reapplying the paragraph style. Mr. X’s problem was solved.

To make things even faster, and with the help of a JavaScript programmer in Mr. X’s IT department, even all the Find/Change queries were automated. Now Mr. X just executes the Style Cleanup script from the Scripts panel. Formatting cleanup that used to take his days is finished within a couple of minutes.