Importing Style Sheets

If you've created a style sheet, you never have to re-create it ‚ assuming you've saved the document that contains the style sheet. InDesign lets you import character and paragraph style sheets from one document into another. Also, when you import text files from word processing programs that use style sheets, you can import the style sheets along with the text.

Importing style sheets from InDesign documents

The Paragraph Styles and Character Styles panes' palette menus contain commands that let you move style sheets between documents. The Paragraph Styles pane lets you import only paragraph style sheets or paragraph and character style sheets; the Character Styles pane lets you import only character style sheets or character and paragraph style sheets. Here's how you do it:

1. If it's not displayed, show the Paragraph Styles pane by choosing Window ‚ Type & Tables ‚ Paragraph Styles or pressing F11, or show the Character Styles pane by choosing Window ‚ Type & Tables ‚ Character Styles or pressing Shift+F11.

2. Choose Load Paragraph Styles from the Paragraph Styles pane's palette menu if you want to import only paragraph styles; choose Load Character Styles from the Character Styles pane's palette menu if you want to import only character style sheets; or choose Load All Styles from either pane's palette menu if you want to import both character and paragraph style sheets.

   Regardless of what kind of style sheets you choose to import, the Open a File dialog box, shown in Figure 20-8, is displayed.

   
   Figure 20-8: The Open a File dialog box when loading style sheets from other documents.

3. Use the controls in the Open a File dialog box to locate the InDesign document that contains the style sheets you want to import.

4. Double-click on the document name or click once on the document name , then click Open.

   Caution ‚  

   If you import a style sheet that has the same name as an existing style sheet, the imported style sheet will replace the existing one. Any text formatted with the original style sheet will be reformatted using the imported style sheet.

   QuarkXPress User ‚  

   InDesign imports all style sheets when you use one of the Load commands. It does not let you select specific style sheets for import, as QuarkXPress does. That can add a lot of irrelevant style sheets to your InDesign document, unfortunately .

You can also use the Copy (Edit ‚ Copy, or z +C or Ctrl+C) and Paste commands (Edit ‚ Paste, or z +V or Ctrl +V) to move a style sheet from one document to another. Simply copy some text in the source document to which the style sheet you want to move has been applied. Then display the target document and use the Paste command to place the copied text into a text frame. The Character Styles and/or Paragraph Styles panes in the target document display the names of the new, "imported" styles.

Working with style sheets in imported text files

In most workgroup publishing environments, writers generate text using Microsoft Word, and InDesign users place the text in a layout and add other design elements ‚ imported pictures, illustrations, lines, and so on ‚ to create a finished publication. Whether writers are producing short magazine articles or lengthy book chapters, chances are they're doing some text formatting as they write ‚ perhaps as little as applying occasional bold or italic styles or as much as using a complete set of style sheets, if their word processor supports them.

When you import a word processing file into InDesign, you can bring the formatting and style sheets along with the text. (See Chapter 4 for a complete list of formatting options that will import from Word.)

Isolated formatting might be used to indicate which style sheets should be applied in InDesign ‚ for example, the writer might apply bold to one-line paragraphs that should be formatted as a subhead. However, if the writer applies appropriate paragraph style sheets to text in her word processor, much of the formatting in InDesign can be automated by importing the style sheets. (Note that word processors' character style sheets are not imported.)

You can use these imported paragraph style sheets in two different ways, depending on whether style sheets with the same name already exist in the InDesign document. To import style sheets with a word processing file, check Retain Format in the Place dialog box (File ‚ Place, or z +D or Ctrl+D).

Cross-Reference ‚  

For more information about using the Place command to import text files, see Chapter 16.

After you place a text file that contains style sheets, the Paragraph Styles pane displays the names of all the imported style sheets, and any text to which style sheets have been applied retains the style sheet's formats as well as a link to the style sheet.

Editing imported paragraph style sheets

If you import paragraph style sheets with text, you can simply use the style sheets specified in the word processor to format the text. This method works well for designs that do not follow a template ‚ for example, brochures or feature stories. You might import the text, experiment with formatting it, then edit the imported style sheets in InDesign to reflect your design.

For example, say you import a magazine feature article that is formatted with three paragraph style sheets (Headline, Byline, and Body Copy) into an InDesign document that does not contain style sheets with those names. The three style sheets are added to InDesign's Paragraph Styles list and have similar specifications to what they had in the word processor. However, since InDesign offers more formatting options, you might modify those style sheets to fine-tune the text formatting. To edit a paragraph style sheet, select it in the Paragraph Styles pane, choose Style Options from the pane's palette menu, then make your changes in the Modify Paragraph Style Options dialog box.

Overriding imported paragraph style sheets

In documents that follow a template, you can provide writers with style-sheet names that must be applied to their text. For example, say you're working on a tri-fold brochure that is part of an entire series of similar tri- folds . The writer might format the text with five paragraph style sheets that also exist in your InDesign document: Heads, Subheads, Body Copy, Bullets, and Quotes. The style-sheet specifications in the word processor don't matter ‚ only the name counts ‚ because the style sheets in an InDesign document override style sheets in imported text files.

For example, the writer's style sheets use standard fonts such as Times and Helvetica along with bold and italic typestyles to distinguish the types of text. But when the word processing file is imported into InDesign, the style sheets are overridden with InDesign style sheets that have the same name but specify the actual fonts used by the designer and the many formatting options available in InDesign.

You can supply writers either with actual style sheets or with only style-sheet names:

• To supply style sheets, export text from a similar story in RTF format, which writers can open in their word processor; the word processor will add the style-sheet names in the RTF file to its own style sheet list. The writers can then save these style-sheet names to a template file and use that template for future documents. To export text, use the Export dialog box (File ‚ Export, or z +E or Ctrl+E) and choose Rich Text Format from the Formats pop-up menu.

• Or, you can simply give writers a list of style-sheet names that they can create themselves to their own specifications. In this case, it's particularly important that the style sheets created in the word processor have exactly the same names as those in the InDesign document.

Exporting style sheets

Although InDesign lets you export text (via the File ‚ Export command), only a few file formats are supported: Text-only (ASCII), Rich Text Format (RTF), and InDesign Tagged Text.

An exported RTF file keeps the style-sheet names but not the actual formatting, which can make further editing difficult in a word processor. An InDesign Tagged Text file retains the style-sheet definitions, but it does so as codes, so again it's hard to deal with in a word processor.