Expert: Roy Wilhelm - 5/21/2010

Question
I have an InDesign book with several Chapters. Each Chapter has about four text styles, which I'd like to be consistent throughout the book, but I'd like the character color to vary from document to document. In the past, I've done this by duplicating the style for each document, but my book now contains 12 chapters, and I don't want 48 paragraph styles.

I thought I'd solve the problem by referencing in each paragraph definition, a color swatch called "Feature," and un-checking "swatches" in the Synchronization Options Dialogue, but when I synchronize, InDesign is reading the nested color swatch reference, and overriding my synchronization options.

Is there a way to turn off synchronization of nested styles? Or am I doing this wrong?

Answer
Hi Daniel,

Sorry to take so long to get a response to you. Very busy times at work for me.

I don't have a ton of experience working with InDesign Books and style synchronization. If I had to guess, I'd say that you'll need to make the color change within the character styles in each document instead of in the paragraph styles.

In my experience, definitions within character styles referenced in nested paragraph styles, will override certain definitions in the paragraph style.

I know it's not as seamless as you'd like, and perhaps there's a simpler method, but I have a feeling it will work.

Good luck and let me know how it goes!