Retain italics & bold using paragraph styles

[rigoliarts]

InDesign CS5 - Mac OS 10.6.8

Is there a way to keep the bold and italic words when importing text and selecting paragraph styles? Working on a book with about one italicized word per paragraph. Please tell me there's a way to format the text using paragraph styles and not loose all the italics.

[Eugene Tyson]

The italics and bold etc. don't have a character style - that's why when you apply the paragraph style it overrides the italics that are hand set.

To apply character styles throughout your text run this script - http://www.jongware.com/binaries/preptext.zip

Download the zip file - unzip it. Then copy the .jsx file to your scripts folder.

http://indesignsecrets.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign.php

Place your cursor at the start of the text and double click the script.

It will pick out any formatting that requires a character style, creates the style and applies it.

Then you can apply paragraph styles without overriding the hand set italics etc.

[rigoliarts]

Eugene,

Does this method work with the font foundry's italics or only the applied style italics which aren't true italics, but only slanted versions of the roman font.

Thanks,

Diane

[Eugene Tyson]

InDesign doesn't apply faux styles, it only uses what is built into the font already in use.

[Peter Spier]

ID doesn't "do" fake italics unless you specifically apply a slope to the text. When you create an italic style you specify that you want to use the italic style of the current face, if such exists. In the case of text where fuax italics are used inthe imported text, jongware's script will eihter fail, because he didn't think to add that possibility, or a style for fake italics will also be created.

[rigoliarts]

Peter,

Do I have to use the jongware script or is there a way to keep italics when using paragraph styles?

Thanks,

Diane

[Peter Spier]

The point of the script is that it automates the creation and appropriate application of the styles where the author failed to do so. It's a HUGE timesaver.

You can preserve the local formatting, and not apply character styles, and your local override italics will remain italic, but if you change the font in the paragraph style the local overrides won't change to match (which is why you want to use character styles instead -- minimalist character styles can just change from roman to bold or italic and not care about the face or the size, so if you change those in the paragraph style your bold or italic text will match).

[Daniel Flavin]

At some point you must appply character styles; you don't have to use the Script, but it's probably a great script if you dedicate the time to use it.

At a minimum, you or the script do a find/replace -

Find > leave the Find What field blank, click Find Format (below) Basic Char Format > Italic

Change Format > Style Options > Character Styke > Choose or Create a style ; Ital

[tal982]

This worked!! Thank you so much!

[Jongware]

All the important bits have been mentioned above (ta, guys!) but let me add this about your question re: "faux" italics.

The script looks for text where its font style is *called* "italics". If this was formatted using InDesign as "faux" italics (using InDesign's Slanted Text option), the script WILL NOT be able to find it -- for the simple reason the font style still is "regular". On the other hand, if this fauxing was done in an imported document from Word (to name a susceptible candidate), the font style *will* be called "Italics", and the script will find it.

Another potential problem is fonts with unique style naming conventions. Some italics variant of Helvetica, for example, is called "Oblique" -- NOT "Italics". Hence the script will NOT find it! Same with a font style such as "Myriad Condensed Italic" or "Minion Pro Condensed Semibold".

You can still use this script, though, if you do the following before running it: call up the Find Font dialog and replace any and all fonts that have non-standard style names with Times New Roman and the correct font style. Then you can run the script, safe in the knowledge it will find all possible variants correctly.

The standard font styles this script looks for are the default set "Italics", "Bold", and "Bold Italics".

[Jongware]

On a slightly similar issue: suppose one author uses the correct "superscript" function in Word to style his text, and another author doesn't like Word's appearance of superscripts and decides to manually "improve" it by making his text slightly smaller and moving them up a bit above the baseline.

One of these will be found and converted into a character style by my script, the other won't. Can you guess which?

[schvabe]

Hello Jongware,

I'm using this script, running perfect till now (Thanks), so I've decide create folders on character styles but I didn't find way to do this changes on scrip.

How put a subfolder named for example "activity".

Thanks

[rigoliarts]

Jongware,

Okay I'm going to try it and I'll get back to you if I have further questions. Thank you!

[valedangelo]

This script worked great for me! It did exactly what it promised and It saved me lot of time!

Bless you!