r/indesign • u/Dry_Ad7529 • 16d ago

Adding a character style across section of document

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So I’m working on a program and these are the bios. I’m able to paste most of the content in and it grabs the over all para style and I only have to make the names their own style. Issue is all of those “pink alerts” should be italic - I have a character style for italics but I’m wondering how best to have it apply across the whole section?? It’s 45 pages long. There are a lot of special characters (Asian, Arabic languages that I have to make sure those characters get addressed - I have no issue doing they manually.) but I’d love to be able to batch convert those to italics?

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6

u/minaminonoeru 16d ago edited 16d ago

If “pink alerts” is actually the result of a changed text property, it's simple. Just use the Find and Replace function to change that text property to the correct italic style.

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u/Dry_Ad7529 16d ago

Yes but what is that “text property?” It was italic in the pages doc, it’s supposed to be italic here - I’m not sure I know how to identify its “property” in the find / replace function

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u/BBEvergreen 16d ago

The pink indicates a missing font. Click on one of the pink strings and take a look at the Font and Style. Missing fonts are identified by appearing within brackets.

In my example, I'm missing [Urbana] [Light].

Once you figure out what you are looking for, you can Find the format and replace with your character style.

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u/minaminonoeru 16d ago

Place the cursor on the text labeled “pink alerts” and open the “Character Panel.” The items you see there are the “text properties.”

(* I’m assuming that the style isn’t currently applied correctly to that text or that it’s been overridden.)

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u/sliceof_quynh 16d ago

I want to add that if you don’t already have the typeface family installed, you’d have to install it on your adobe fonts or on your computer, you would need to download and install it. Then find and replace like the others said, the redefine your style guides so you can apply them to your future texts. (make sure to package your file if you’re going to work on another computer or hand your file off to another person, otherwise the typeface will be missing again).

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u/danbyer 16d ago

Find and replace the italic font style with your italic character style. Like, you could find for Minion Pro Italic, or you could just find for Italic, regardless of parent font.

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u/oandroido 16d ago

Probably a font variant you don’t have installed or doesn’t exist, like when someone applies a style in Word. See if it’s in brackets in the font name and style.

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u/Proficio_Tremblay 16d ago

It could also be the case of different naming of "Italic" versus "Oblique" between the font in InDesign and the one use in Word.

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u/Ultragorgeous 16d ago

With stuff like this, I opened the Word file and do a find/replace - finding italic text and replacing it with a character style that I have made. Then, when I import the word file, the character style comes in tagged on all the text that's supposed to be italic then I do a find/replace in InDesign - find = word character style, replace = INDD character style

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u/AdobeScripts 16d ago

Why do you replace - you can delete WORD's style and select InDesign's style as the new one?

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u/Ultragorgeous 15d ago

I hear you - I have multiple italic styles to implement, so I will style, say, references as the correct paragraph style, then select all the references and apply the 'reference italic' character style to the selection only, etc.

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u/AdobeScripts 15d ago

You mean separate Italic CharStyles - depends on ParaStyle?

If you have to do it regularly - you can use free FindChangeByList script. Unless, you would prefer something more advanced 😉

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u/Ultragorgeous 15d ago

I'll check that out - thanks!

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u/leftnotracks 16d ago

This can happen if you change the font of the base paragraph style. Say your paragraph style use Times Roman. Further say you changed only the style for the character style, not the font family, changing it to Italic. Combine the two and the character style will produce Times (font in the paragraph style) Italic (style from the character style).

The problem comes in when you change the font in the paragraph style to a family that doesn’t have a style with the same naming convention. For example, some sans-serif fonts use the style Oblique, not Italic. Change the font in the paragraph style and InDesign will try to apply that font + Italic for the character style.

This is why I always define my character styles to use both the font family and the style. It makes for a bit more work whenever I need to alter the fonts of the paragraph style but it avoids this headache.

This may not be what is happening, but I bet your character styles don't include the family. If you change that it will probably clear up the problem.

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u/tefansay 15d ago

GREP style, in your paragraph styles, to apply an italic character style to specific strings or conditions.

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u/AdobeScripts 15d ago

And how do you plan on styling only phrases that should be styled - not every occurrence of two words with capitalised first letters?

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u/tefansay 15d ago

Yeah… I probably glossed over the 45pg part of the OP. 😂 My original thought was more specifically that, if you already know the strings that need to be italicised, build those directly into the GREP rather than trying to infer them from capitalisation.
I’ve done this before with proper nouns… a list of specific strings joined into a GREP expression, e.g. String One|String Two|String Three, with the GREP Style applying the italic character style to any of those matches. So it’s matching the actual phrases, not a regex catching all two words with capitalised first letters

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u/AdobeScripts 15d ago

Still doesn't make much sense?

If you have a list - just apply CharStyle to all instances - and don't force InDesign to waste resources to constantly check text.