Preventing Transfer of Swatches and Styles Between InDesign Documents

[Guest]

Is there a way to prevent objects or text from bringing in associated swatches/styles when being copied from one InDesign document to another?

I work in a lot of different InDesign documents where I have to copy old text from one document to another, and often times the original paragraph styles are transferred into my new, clean document, muddying it up with tons of irrelevant styles that I have to go through and delete manually. I know how to paste without formatting between documents but for some reason their associated swatches/styles are still transferred to the new document when the names differ. It's a very time consuming task to go through a delete all of the copied styles/swatches and reassign to the document's established ones, and I would love to find a work-around that strips clipboard items of their previous styles.

[SJRiegel]

You can strip out the styles before copying the text, using Break Link to Style. Just close without saving (or open the old document as a copy, so there is no chance of saving over the original)

[Laubender]

jessv60520725 wrote:

…I know how to paste without formatting between documents but for some reason their associated swatches/styles are still transferred to the new document when the names differ. …

Hi,

do you have a test case for this?
Two simple documents where this happens if you copy and paste without formatting text from A to B .

Or did it happen, if you pasted text where a table was included?

Setting back tables with their table styles and cell styles is a task of its own.

See here:

6. Re: How to break link to cell/table style in a selection

Marc Autret Dec 15, 2013 (in response to Uwe Laubender)

https://forums.adobe.com/message/5931169#5931169

Marc's blog post about this can be read here:

Breaking Link to Cell/Table Style in the Selection

Marc Autret June 19, 2014

Indiscripts :: InDesign Scripting Forum Roundup #6

Regards,
Uwe

[Laubender]

I should have added, that with InDesign CC 2015 a new type of cell was introduced: Graphic Cell
And I did not test that script by Marc enough to tell, if it will work as expected with CC 2015 and CC 2017.

Did some tests now with CC 2015 and I think that you could use Marc's script with setting the level to value 2.

As an additional step you need to apply the "[Basic Table Style]" to the table before you can safely copy/paste the table to a different document without transferring any unnecessary styles that are coming from "Cell Style" or "Table Style" definitions.

It remains to be seen if copy/paste text with tables is the real problem you are facing.

Regards,
Uwe