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InDesign: Fixing Style Overrides Throughout Entire Files

Multi-Page Layout Workflow

1

Set the Grid

Layout → Margins and Columns. Baseline grid for vertical alignment.

2

Create Master Pages

A-Master with template, additional masters for chapter openers.

3

Style Sheets

Build paragraph and character styles before placing copy.

4

Place Copy

File → Place. Auto-flow with shift-click to fill multiple pages.

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Virtually no one knows this trick. You are joining a very small and selective club. The fewer people who know about this the smarter you will look, so you have to promise not to tell too many people who it’s this easy! This works on any kind of style, from Paragraph and Character styles to Object styles.

The Problem:

  • You have content that has a style applied, but there are overrides on the style (the content is formatted differently than the style). Changing the style doesn’t affect the document because of the overrides. InDesign is maintaining the overrides, instead of using the style’s definition.

  • An example of the problem: There’s a sidebar style that has rounded corners and we want to change the amount of roundness. The sidebar frames in the file don’t have rounded corners though, so changing the roundness in the object style has no effect. This happened to us when upgrading CS5 to CS5.5 because of an InDesign bug that lost our corners.

The Solution:

  1. If you don’t know what is different, first select the object or text. Then mouse over the style (which should have a + after it) and a tooltip will appear saying what the overrides are.

  2. Edit the style and set it to match how the items in your layout currently look. It does NOT matter how you want them to look, so yes you are changing your style to something you don’t want, but it must match the current items to lose the override.

    TIP: With your object or text selected, you can use Redefine Style in the Paragraph/Character/ Object Styles panel menu to make the style match the currently selected object/text instead of having to manually do this!

  3. Click OK to close the style window.

  4. Go back into the same style and change the settings back to what you want. After doing this everything will actually change to how you want it! (You must edit the style and manually change things. Using Undo doesn’t work.)

TIP: You don’t even have to close the window if you change the style with Preview checked on. Just change the style to match the current content; then change it right back and it will update!

Another Example (With Text)

When importing a Word file, the text may come in with overrides. Let’s say the text has a different font than the applied Paragraph style:

  1. Edit the Paragraph style and change the font to what the text is using. NOTE: You may have multiple overrides (font, size, etc.). You’ll have to update each item—or use Redefine Style in the Paragraph Styles panel menu.

  2. Edit the Paragraph style again and change the font (or whatever setting you need to) back to what you want it to be and watch all the text change! Do not use Undo to change it back, you must manually make these changes for it to work.

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