Applying Styles...

[schnate]

I have setup a number of paragraph styles and within each applied the correct next style so they should flow through something like this:

Name
Title
First Paragraph w/Drop Caps
Reg Paragraph
Same
same
etc...

If I start typing in the first one it moves smoothly through the paragraph styles with each return, but what I would like is to able to import a story from word or whatever, apply the first style and have the rest fall in line.
Just like nested styles but for successive paragraphs, not just within one paragraph...???

Any heroes out there?
I fear this may require an Adobe tool request/plug-in...

-Nate

 

[eugenetyson]

No problem. You are correct. The next style is only really for inputting type so you don't have to change styles going from one paragraph to another. But importing it doesn't apply the style for you.

What you need to do is:

File>Place
Locate file

On the bottom of that dialogue box is a check box to show import options.

Press OK

You will see another box come up.

Now you can MAP STYLES

When you do this you will get another box up and from here you can select the styles from WORD and MAP them to your INDESIGN styles.

This only works if the Word file already has styles applied. It doesn't matter what they look like in Word as long as you map that style to the InDesign styles it will be fine.

Be warned not to have any style selected, either character or paragraph style in your text box.

 

[schnate]

Thanks for the reply!
That's really good to know. Sadly none of my contributors use any styling. I think I'm going to go to Adobe and request an "apply styles to story" plug in or patch or something....

 

[MarcusStringer]

If you get your contributors to add little codes at the start of Heading etc...eg

<Name>this is my name
<Title> this tis the title

Then when you bring in the text simply select all and apply the RegParaStyle to you text.

Then all you have to do, is a heap of search and replaces ie
find <Name> and change it to Name Para style etc

Then find <Name> and replace it with nothing so that it deletes it.


Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[schnate]

Thinking outside the box, I like it.
That said - that solution takes longer than mousing over to the paragraph styles pallet... so no dice... It actually
makes more work for both me and the writter.
Thanks for playing...

 

[MarcusStringer]

Thinking outside the box, I like it.
That said - that solution takes longer than mousing over to the paragraph styles pallet... so no dice... It actually
makes more work for both me and the writter.

Are you serious? Do you really think you could page, say, a 100 page title clicking on the paras as you go compared to 4 or 5 find and replaces all which would take less than 5 minutes.

And you're correct it would take longer for the writer to type in <a>, <b> or <c> in front of the paragraphs. It doesn't have to be <ParagraphName>

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[schnate]

Not to say your solution isn't good... You just aren't aware of the scope of the task (my fault not yours...) The entire story has the same style, save for the the first 3 lines that would compose a 2 style by line - one for the Name and another for their title - and one more style that gives the first actual story paragraph a drop caps... It's 4 clicks at most...

Secondly the contributors I have to deal with are usually not that swish with computers (again not your fault) so it doesn't fly.

It's a good idea for other people to keep in mind. Quark supports those tag styles with no find/replace required but quark is the devil (that's someone's fault but not yours).

*I'll pet your ego for a moment*
It's a really, really, really good idea. I wish I could use it.

For anyone else - If you know of a plug-in that can help out I'd love to hear about it. If you have some crazy work around, kudos but the job is too small to warrant it.

Thanks again. It's hard to hear my tone of voice here, and I know I sound like a dick. Just pretend you know me really well and assume I'm kidding. I do appreciate the help...

 

[eugenetyson]

Not to sound bad or anything but you don't need a plug-in just a little help from your contributors.

I do a bi-monthly magazine and we have over 14 different contributors.

I made a styled sheet in word.

Heading 1 was large and orange, that's where their title goes.

A black and small type face for the author's name.

Green Heading for Level 1 Headings

Blue Heading for Level 2 Headings.

Black type for the body with 1.5 line spacing.

And so on.

When the contributor opens our word template they can copy and paste these styles depending.

When we get them back we tidy them up, because some make a little mess of them.

Then it's just a straight input to indesign. If the style doesn't come in correct you can automatically see what Level Heading it is by the colour coding applied.

It's just a matter of educating the contributors and getting them to play the game too.

A script that applies the next paragraph heading woudn't work. How would indesign know how much body text or paragraphs where inbetween each heading, how many different level headings you have, tables, objects, etc. It wouldn't. You have to tell it exactly what you want. If you want to automate it, get your Word Styles done, then send them to your contributors and get them to play too. Explain that it will help increase production time, which it does. And there's many more advantages with this.

 

[schnate]

My contributors are forever changing and usually quite stupid. I don't have time to train them.

What I would like is to be able to import plain text and apply a "style set" to the whole story. As demonstrated by this thread it doesn't exist... yet. I'm going to Adobe about it.

Thanks to all for your replies.

 

[eugenetyson]

There is nothing Adobe can do.

Example 1

Heading 1
Body text
Heading 2
Body text
Heading 3


Example 2

Heading 1
Body text
Body text
Heading 2
Body text
Body text
Body text
Heading 3
Body text
Body text
Body text
Body text
Body text
Body text
Heading 1
Body text
Heading 2
Body text
Heading 3
Body text
Body text
Body text
Body text
Body text

Now how on Earth would any script in the world be able to pick out what is body text and what is a heading, let alone the amount of paragraphs that it has or how many levels of headings it has.

It's a completely pointless script to write as it's completely impossible to achieve. InDesign is not an Artificial Intelligence. It doesn't have common sense, it doesn't have a mind of it's own. You, the user, have to tell it what style to apply where.

There are short cuts you can take for applying styles, like building them into the paragraph and character styles.

You are wasting your time going to adobe as I'm sure they won't get back to you.

They prioritise things that need to be done in InDesign by the amount of requests that it gets. As most people know, you can't autostyle a document, so it's on the bottom of there list as they have more pressing matters to deal with, like an indexing bug, grep bugs, et al type of bugs, it's pointless to even think you can, you're wasting your time and energy, it's like trying to invent perpetual motion, it's not physically posssible.

Just roll up your sleeves and start doing the work and stop waiting for a robot to come along, I don't mean to sound or come across as rude but I'm not, I'm trying to help, in trying not get you to waste your time.

I've told you how to do what you want to do and the only way possible, so either do it or don't.

What do you think is going to happen:

At the Adobe offices-
Employee "schnate (TechnicalUser) said in an email to us that we should have a style set that he can apply to the whole document so he doesn't have to"

Boss "oh that's a great idea, tell you what, stop fixing that indexing bug and get started on this task, it's much more important that the indexing bug"

Employee "right-o boss, I can't believe we didn't think of doing that in the first place"

Boss "I know, what were we thinking?"

Boss "Tell you what, lets release another version of InDesign for schnate (TechnicalUser) and sell it, CS3 will be obsolete for this feature that will barely work if at all"

You have to do the work, there is no Design My Document button, or do what I'm thinking of next button, or anything like that. Get stuck in, do the work and don't be looking for a magical fix that doesn't and could never exist.

I'm saying this to help you, not embarrass you, not to insult you, not to get your hopes down or any of those things, I'm saying this to let you know that you are wasting your time with this idea. It's been thought of before and it's not going to happen, not any day soon anyway.

Sorry for the long winded post, but arggghhhh... the amount of times I have to explain this to people, grrrrr it gets up my goat!!!

 

[schnate]

lol....

eugenetyson:

I want it to work on a per story or even per selection basis. If you can't grasp what I'm after, then relax - It's not your problem. I'm merely making a suggestion to adobe and certainly don't expect them to put it before bug fixes or anything... Your penchant for the dramatic brightened my day

I know it can't be done yet but within each style you can define next "next style". It looks at it on a per paragraph basis so with each return it moves to the next style and if the terminal style move to the "same style" as in my example then it will carry on with that style 'til the end.

Your examples could be handled by the ability to nest whole paragraph styles with a simple special character to denote when to start the chain over... Currently we can do this within a single paragraph with multiple character styles.
I use nested styles for car ads - heading/info/price/stock number - and it works quite well on large amounts of copy..

I don't think the functionality I'm after is too complex for adobe to handle. I for one have faith in Adobe's capabilities - I don't expect that they should listen to me, but can't we all agree it would be nice

 

[glengraessley]

"If you know of a plug-in that can help out"

You might want to try WoodWing SmartStyles. If you have a detectable pattern SmartStyles can save a lot of time. You can download SmartStyles with a 30 day trial license. The software allows you to style once and apply repeatedly with a drag and drop. An example ID file and Smart Style library are included. (Example #6 might be most relevant.)

http://woodwing.com/en/Download

Good luck.

 

[schnate]

Cheers... I'll have a look at that...

 

[eugenetyson]

If you can't grasp what I'm after, then relax - It's not your problem.

That is the statement of the century and quite ironic considering the direction the conversation took.

I'm glad you took the post light-heartidly, and it was meant so.

Look the problem that you have here with the nested style is this and the next style scenario.

You put in Heading 1<return, operates to the body text style>
Then you put in the body style and want another paragraph so you put in a return <return, operates same style>
Now you have to put in a heading 2 <click on that in the paragraph styles now, because your body text style has a next style, same style applied>

Then it just keeps going.

I know exactly what you're after, and I perhaps agree to some degree that where you have specified the next style to be a Heading then it should do it, I know this and I know what you're getting at.

As for a set of selected paragraphs, now that is a good idea. From your original post it sounded like you just wanted indesign to format your document for you.

I was like, this guy is nuts!!! But you're not and all is well.

 

[eugenetyson]

How naive I was... you can actually do this and I don't know why I did not think of it before, I guess because I'm stubborn sometimes but here's some humble pie and I'm eating it.

It's all down to having the correct character styles and the correct paragraph styles setup.

You can do nested paragraph styles as well as nested character styles.

So if you have 5 lines of text then have Paragraph 1-5 styles set up.

In Paragraph 1 style>Drop Caps and Nested Styles>

Put in nested styles for Pargaraph 2-5 styles and use the operation of FORCED BREAK LINE.

Now with your character styles that you've set up, you can nest more styles inside these the same as above.

So this could be your text

This is a heading
Ph.: 1234567
Part No.: #123456
Name: John Doe
Address: 1234 Fake Street

So for each Paragraph style the 1st one nests Paragraph 2 in, and Para 2 nests Para 3 and Para 4 nests Para 5.

Each paragraph style then also has character styles nested into them.

So Para 1 is bold <NEST PARA 2>
Then nest a style up to ":" and then nest up to a character count of 7 digits a different style. When there is a paragraph return (forced line break) then PARA 3 style should kick in, along with the Character styles for Para 3

Rinse and repeat.

But of course this only works for text that is contantly appearing like this, i.e., table of contents, TV Guide etc.

You can format a whole document page by simply selecting one style that has all the other styles nested inside it. Wolla.

Sorry for my impatience the other day, we all have bad days.

 

[MarcusStringer]

Did you know that you can apply the Next Para setting to pre existing type.

Set up you para style so they have next styles in place then

select the type you want to change then instead of selecting a para style.

right click (two button mouse) or control click on the First style so the menu appears then select

Apply "stylename" then next style

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[MarcusStringer]

You can also put this in your Applescript window and smoke it...

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS3"
	activate
	tell active document
		
		set applied paragraph style of parent story of text frame 1 to "Body"
		
		set applied paragraph style of paragraph 1 of parent story of text frame 1 to "Heading1"
		
		set applied paragraph style of paragraph 2 of parent story of text frame 1 to "Heading2"
		
	end tell
end tell

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[schnate]

look at the collection of great minds I've facilitated ...
You guys rule!