
In a small text frame, we type a few words (usually the name of the style) and then apply one or more styles to them. One of our favorite uses for libraries (see “Library panel” in Chapter 1, “Workspace”) is to save paragraph and character styles that we use in multiple documents. You can always tell one of these styles from those created in InDesign because the panels display a little gray floppy disk icon next to the style name. When you import a Microsoft Word or RTF file that includes paragraph or character styles that don’t exist in the InDesign publication, those styles get added to the Character Styles and Paragraph Styles panels. You can also synchronize style sheets among all the documents in a book when you use the Book panel, which we talk about in Chapter 8, “Long Documents.” If the styles already exist, InDesign overrides the style definitions in the incoming text with the style definitions of the existing styles. If the styles do not exist in the document you’ve pasted the text into, InDesign adds them. You can also move styles by copying text tagged with the styles you want from one publication and pasting it into another document (or dragging a text frame from one document into another). When you import styles that have the same name as styles that already exist in the publication, InDesign overrides the attributes of the existing styles with the attributes of the incoming styles.

Learn More Buy Copying Styles from Other Publications
