Help, my character styles palette is blank.

Styles do not show up even whenI open older files. Cannot cerate new styles either. Anyone know about a solution to this?

What the text at the top of this forum says:
InDesign Troubleshooting 101: The most common advice when things don't work
Trash, Replace, Reset, or Restore the application Preferences: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/526990

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PSE 9 Help! My effects palette is blank! Also help installing actions..

Maybe these two problems are related?
I am new to PSE 9 but I was using 8 until now. I have great Actions that worked beautifully in PSE 8. I am trying to install them the same way for PSE 9 but I seem to be missing a whole folder.
The path I take is:
Library>Application Support>Adobe>PSE>9.0>Locale>
Then All there is is a "Photo Creations Thumbnails" folder which is empty.
Do I need to reinstall PSE?
Also, My effects palette is totally blank! Nothing there to click on!
Please help!!!
Thanks!

Thank you so much for all your help
I ended up Uninstalling and Re-installing. The effects palette is working fine now-but I am still unable to install my actions for some reason.
I went the same route and found the Photo Creations folder, copy pasted my actions.. When I opened PS, they were not there.
I went back and looking in the Photo Creations folder and the actions were not there. I RE-copied them in the folder and it said they were already there?
Weird.
I clicked to replace the old ones, and I still do not actually see them in the folder.
What the heck?

Issue with right aligning of Character Styles in my TOC

Hello all!
I'm working on my very first book project and I have been reading soooo many threads on here for the past hour, but i either just don't get it, or i didn't find what i needed still, so i already apologize in case this very question has been answered before ...
ok, so ... i am building my TOC and have set up the corresponding TOC styles to the paragraph styles used throughout the book.
what i want is for the page number to appear before the entry. so for the page number i have set up it's own TOC page number character style.
NOW
the page number appears left aligned. I have checked the character styles palette and there i can't set a tab for the page number to appear right aligned ...
how do i get this page number to be right aligned? and THEN, how do i specify the distance between the page number and the entry? there is "tab character"mentioned on the TOC dialogue box to specify the distance between page number and entry, but then do i have to go in manually every time something changes? that can't be it? i have seen in the paragraphy styles palette there is a tab section ... tried to input the tabs so the number would appear right aligned and the distance to the entry, but nothing happened, then the number is stuck right on the entry once the TOC is generated ...
does this make any sense?
will attach a screenshot to try to clarify the issue ...
hope you can help me out.
thanks a lot in advance!
cheers
sta-cy

sta-cy wrote:
sorry to have bugged you.
Seriously, if we didn't enjoy this stuff we wouln't be here. It's not like we even get T-shirts. :-P
An awful lot of what I know and am able to pass on comes from having spent waaaaay to much time here reading about odd problems and trying to figure out ways to solve them. I'd never seen a requst like yours until the other day, but then up pops Joel with a similar story, and what do you know, this may not be such a strange thing to want at all. Hopefully your question, and the work we put into trying to find an answer, has not only helped you, but some other users who come along next week or next year.
Everybody starts someplace and at some point in time. There's no shame in being a beginner, and less in asking for help when you need it, especially after you put in the effort you did on your own to try to find a solution. It's also true that some folks are more design oriented and others more process oriented, and that's just the way it is. This forum has many, many, followers who are expert in different areas of InDesign (even the engineers who write the program are not experts in all the various parts) and are here to share what they know as volunteers. You are always welcome here, especially when the question is as intersting as this one.

Break link to Character Style with JS (CS4ME)

Hi,
I'm wondering how to break a link to a character style in JS. By break
link I mean removing the character style but preserving the formatting.
Given a selected textStyleRange, say, in the UI there are two ways of
doing this. One is to click "Break link to Style" in the flyout meny of
the character style palette.
The other is to right-click and select "Apply character style."
It's a little unintuitive, because CLICKING on removes overrides,
but right-clicking and selecting the menu option doesn't.
So when I saw that, I said to myself aha! Probably:
myText.appliedCharacterStyle = myCharStyle
is equivalent to clicking on , while
myText.applyCharacterStyle(myCharStyle)
is equivalent to right-clicking on and choosing "Apply character
style."
But it isn't.
They both apply None and remove all formatting.
So, anyone know how to break a link to character style without removing
formatting in JS?
Thanks,
Ariel

Thanks Peter. That's interesting. After Shabbos I'll have to try figure
out how to apply a character style without removing overrides as well.
It may be a two-step procedure.
Thanks,
Ariel

CS3 Character Style Changes Color On Save

Hi All-
I have a CS3 file where I imported character styles (using the character styles palette -> load character styles) from another file. I apply that style to a type layer, it looks fine (i.e. is applied correctly), then I save the file, and close. Upon opening the file that char. style's color is changed from white to a spot color. Any idea why?
System: AI CS3 on Windows XP 32bit
Thanks in advance.
Tom

Hi,
I had a similar problem, which was caused by type having "overrides"
when applying Character Styles.
This is indicated by an asterisk appearing in the Character style name in the palette) when you select the type.
This has something to do with applying a new style to type which already
has some appearance attributes.
Found that the solution was to clear overrides when applying a character style to selected type, by Alt-clicking on the new character style.
Then, hopefully, the character style of the type is saved properly, and displays correctly the next time you open the drawing.
Bye...
Andrew

Autogenerate XML tag names from other style palettes

Map Styles to Tags works great when you already have a bunch of tags named identically to the other styles you want to map. Today, however, I had to manually create and type in tag names to match about 25 paragraph styles. Ick!
It would be really neat if you could select a bunch of styles in the Para or character Styles palettes and have a "Create Matching Tags" command that would automatically add tags matching those style names to your Tags list. No muss, no fuss, no typos.
Thanks! The XML fuctions are mostly extremely cool!

FYI, I am using
Win Xp-SP2, CS5 7.0.3

My character styles have disappeared

About a week and a half ago, my character styles completely disappeared. They're fine in InDesign, but in InCopy they're just *gone.*
This is what the paragraph styles palette looks like:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v698/lastmidnight/grafstyles.jpg
This is what the character styles palette looks like:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v698/lastmidnight/charstyles.jpg
Our IT people are stumped. They reinstalled the software to no effect. Does anyone know what could have possibly caused this? Nobody else on the network is having the same problem.
Thanks in advance for any insight you all might be able to give. Please let me know what other information you need to diagnose this.
Much obliged,
Jen Rubio

Looks like corrupt preferences.
This is for InDesign but the process for resetting them in InCopy is the same...and no, reinstalling won't do a thing.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/526990
Bob

Character Styles dialog box suddenly blank - cannot fix

Things were going funky (InDesign ignored all standard keyboard commands unless I clicked first into note pad), so I stopped, shut down and restarted the entire computer. Upon reload, my file came up, however, the character styles dialog box was blank (options to add and import etc. are still visible in the breakout to the right, but nothing appears in the box itself now matter the document).
Is there a prefs file that I can delete to restore this (much like the old aiprefs?) or is this going to require an entire uninstall of the design suite and reinstall?
Has anyone else seen this? Anyway to fix this?
EDIT: Oops here's my set up:
OS: Vista
HP Pavillion
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'd love to avoid a reinstall if possible.
-Suzanne

OK got it... in case anyone else needs to know:
Go to: [username] > Application Data > Adobe > InDesign > Version X (your version)
Drag that entire Version 4.0 folder to your desktop and then start InDesign again. It will recreate the entire Version 4.0 folder and its myriad files. I say “drag it to the desktop” instead of deleting it because you might have finely-tuned workspaces or long lists of AutoCorrect entries that you’d like to hang on to.
Found it on the InDesign Secrets blog.

Show Nested Character Styles in Character Palette

When a character style is nested in a paragraph style it would be nice if the Character palette highlighted the character style used when text with that nested paragraph/character style is selected.
It would also be nice if when a character style used in a nested style is changed on the page (and not through the character style) if then the "Redefine Style" option from the Character palette fly-out menu could be used to redefine the style.

I posted this in another thread before I discovered this one:
I just upgraded to Pages 5.
I opened a document that I'd been working on in the previous version of Pages. It has several styles, incuding a bulleted list style called "main bullet".
I attempted to apply that style to a section of text, and while it did indent the text properly, it did not add bullets. (Also, in the Style panel a bullet does not appear next to the "main bullet" style as it does in Pages 4. This was my first clue that something was wrong.)
So I went back in the text to a bulleted list that uses the "main bullet" style. I selected the text, then went to the Style panel and chose "main bullet" > update style. This did not seem to help. The "main bullet" style still has no bullet next to it in the Style panel, and when I tried again to apply it to some text, the bullet doesn't appear.
I decided to try a different style, in this case "body". I went to a section that has the "main bullet" style, selected it, and applied "body". The indentation changed, but it did not remove the bullet as it was supposed to.
Is this a bug, or do styles work differently in Pages 5?
It appears that styles do not include formatting like bullets, which, if true, is a huge problem.
I was also upset to learn that once I've opened a document in Pages 5, I can no longer open it in Pages 4. So I'm essentially stuck with Pages 5 whether I like it or not.
Is anyone else noticing this?

Help Needed - FusionFx Style - How do I remove the Dashboard Grey Box Section, so that Dashboard Background is Blank

Help Needed - FusionFx Style - How do I remove the Dashboard Grey Box Section, so that Dashboard Background is Blank
We like FusionFx Style but would like to keep the background white like blafp style.

Can you be a little more descriptive on what you need here and explain what exactly you want to be changed.

URGENT: Paragraph/Character style help (doing massive amounts manually)

I'm using CS3 at work but if it's magically easier, i may have access to cs4 (less likely but possible). It's a long post but I wanted to be in depth with my problem which at its core is simple. I have included a 2-page spread example in pdf.
What I greatly need help with is your opinion of how I can set this up to speed up the process, unify the document, and make future edits simple instead of crazy difficult. Can I configure a paragraph style to NOT replace font style? Can that style include my preset tabs (for bullets) which list as follows?:
number, small letter, roman numeral, bullet
Let me start by saying I SCOUR the net and all available options before posting. I'm cleaning up/editing a production manual for a portrait company I work for and am new to indesign but have figured many things out. I'm quite proficient with the Adobe Suite and computers. I'm using last year's indesign file and it was done very poorly. The words are right, the lines are right, the tabs are terrible and i've needed to move many pages out of order and add plenty. I also chose to disable 1 text box that flows from page to page (i see now it's helpful but they had made it impossible for me to use the existing one and I didn't have time to redo). The pictures I can add and manipulate freely but an embedded text-wrapped version would be nice as well (less important by far).
The manual is spiral bound with text on the right page and a notes page on the left for the layout. (flipped open the left side is lines for notes and the right side is operations). It's set up with a Header at the top (in some cases a sub header almost identical right below it), a space or two, then an outline format IE:
1)     Open job
          a) Go into G:\Location
          b) Select job code
               i) *Note: Be sure to select the right one (etc)..
2)      Continue
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |                    Picture                      |
                                   |                                                    |
                                   |______________________________|
Page size is 8.5x11 with a .5 safe print border all around (document is 11x17). The Document is about 100 pages of written directions (so double that for indesign pages). It will be printed on a Xerox IGen3. The whole book give or take is set up like that. Thus, a few paragraph and character styles are in order. I've been editing/cleaning up each page re-tabbing, re-laying out. It's hell and must be done in 2 days.
I'm using Myriad Pro universally as the font. The sizes are as follows:
Header: 16 bold center
Sub (if applicable): 15 bold center
Body: 12 point
I've gotten paragraph styles to work sort of. I tried setting up numbering and bulleting but it's been giving me so much grief that I typed those all by hand or have just adjusted existing ones (I don't have much time currently, BUT need to learn for future updates and to convert it to styles). I know styles are the way to go with a couple master pages involving bulleting and character styles... however I could not become an expert overnight unfortunately; i tried =)
The real killer for paragraph styles have been:
- The portions of the directions that pertain to specific menu options or clicks are in bold, occasional important info is red. Normal text including numbers/bullets are normal. There are many words repeated that need bold so perhaps some kind of search/replace script could help however im not positive.
- When I go to apply a paragraph style it must make all type bold or not bold. It doesn't replace the color of the text which is good.
- Having major trouble with bullets/numbers working the way i'd like.

It is unfortunate you only have two days, but you could play around with these suggestions below and see if they help more than they hender... (NOTE: SAVE A COPY OF THE DOCUMENT BEFORE YOU START MONKEYING AROUND IN CASE YOU HATE THE RESULTS!)
For starters, you could certainly do the lists via stylesheet. It would require 3 lists based on your sample. Base list 2 and 3 on list 1 or all 3 on a default List paragraph style, so that you can globally control your list formatting without having to change all 3 each time you want to apply a tweak.
List 1 would be leve 1, 1,2,3 style with indents like 3p, -1.5, 3p. Align right and don't restart numbers. If you want bold numbers, make a bold character style called List# and apply it.
List 2 would be level 2, a,b,c style with indents like 4p, -1p, 4p. Restart on level change.
List 3 would be level 3, i,ii,iii style with indents like 6.5p, -1.5p, 6.5p. Restart on level change.
Tweak as necessary to match your actual text.
Then just do a global GREP search and replace, replacing out the manual list numbers with real styles.
List 1 replace ^\t[0-9]+\t with ~- (discretionary hyphen is a nice invisible character that won't break anything) and paragraph style of list1.
List 2 replace ^\t\t[a-z].\t with ~- and paragraph style list2.
List 3 replace ^\t\t\t[ivx].\t with ~- and paragraph style list3.
The last step of list replacement would be to manually restart numbering for each new list.
As for the keywords, unless you have a complete list of what will be bold and it will always be bold, just manually style them with character styles.
Make a character style called "Keyword" and apply bold to the formatting.
Make a character style called "Keyword Important" and apply bold and red formatting.
If you know certain words are always, always the same and you have CS4, you could create a GREP style that applied Keyword character style to any words that matched.
For example, if the keywords Left, Right, Top, Bottom always were bolded at the beginning of the paragraph, you could add the GREP style that applied Keyword to ^(Top|Bottom|Left|Right).
In all likelihood you will be applying a lot of manual keywords too though, so make sure you put a keyboard shortcut on (like cmd-opt-1, 2, etc) on the Keyword and Keyword Important character styles. That way you can just fire through selecting text and whacking cmd-opt-1 where appropriate.

JS:CS3 Newbie needs help! find/change character styles

I'm new to scripting and JavaScript is giving me a headache, but I'll keep trying. What I'm trying to do is automate a few things so that the production time of our school newspaper is reduced while insuring accuracy.
I've played around a little with the text find change sample and the changing or adding paragraph styles in the InDesignCS3_ScriptingGuide_JS.pdf and I barely understand what I'm doing.
When us page designers receive text to place in the document, our editors mark the text with tags like: text, where the word "text" is to be bolded. (there wouldn't any spaces between < and b and > etc. I just did that so It'll show up here). We have basic character styles and paragraph styles set up, and we just started working with nested styles.
Is there a way we can search for the tag and bold everything after it up until the tag? Sort of the way it does for html (the way it would do for this message if I took out the spaces). It'll be great if it could remove the tags as well, but if not, I know I could create a find/change script to do the removal afterwards.
I appreciate any input.
Thanks!

You've not found yourself the easiest of tasks! You need GREP find/replace, not text. Do you have any experience with GREP? It's worth investigating, it's a powerful feature. The script below handles bold. For clarity, it doesn't do any error checking: it assumes that there's a document with text in it and that the document contains a character style called 'bold'.
// talk to Indesign, nobody else
#target indesign
// reset the Find/Change dialog
app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;
// find everything between and (including these codes)
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '.+?';
// add 'bold' style
app.changeGrepPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = 'bold';
// make the changes
app.activeDocument.changeGrep();
// now delete the and codes
app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '</?b>';
app.changeGrep();
You can adapt it easily to handle other codes, and at a later stage you could generalise it so that you needn't repeat whole bunches of code.
Good luck with your first forays. Again, it's not the easiest of tasks, but it's worth getting to grips with.
Peter

Help!! Disappearing Character Styles

I have a strange problem. I have created a Character Style in Pages '09, which I can use when I am in a document, but that style disappears as soon as I close the document. Likewise, even if I keep the original document open, the style is still not visible if I create a new document.
Does anyone have any thoughts about what I can do?
Thanks very much.

It's perfectly normal.
A style is a document's property, not a program's one.
In pages 130/131 of the Pages User Guide (English version) we may read:
*+Importing Styles from Another Document+*
+When you import a document from Microsoft Word, any styles it contains are imported into the Pages document and can then be used the same way you use any other styles created within Pages.+
+You can import styles that have already been defined in another Pages document without importing the document’s content.+
+To import styles from a Pages document:+
+1 Choose Format > Import Styles.+
+2 Select the document that contains the styles you want to import, and then click Open.+
+3 Select the styles you want to import in the dialog. Hold down the Command key as you click the style names to select multiple styles, or click Select All.+
+4 To replace styles in your document that have the same name as the styles you are importing, select “Replace duplicates.”+
+Note that replacing a style will affect any text that uses this style. Replacing a style also changes the style of text in locked objects, but the text retains its original appearance.+
+If an imported style has the same name as a style in the open document and you do+
+not select “Replace duplicates,” a number is appended to the name of the imported style. For example, if you import a style called Body to a document that already contains a Body style, the imported style will be named Body 2.+
+5 Click OK.+
+You can make imported paragraph styles available by clicking the Paragraph Style pop-up menu in the format bar and in the Styles drawer of your document. Imported character and list styles will be available in the Styles drawer.+
+To maintain a consistent look among several documents, keep a master document that contains all the styles you need. When you need to change a style, change it in the master document and import the master document’s styles into the other documents.+
Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mercredi 14 janvier 2009 12:59:06)

[CS3 JS] Correcting a Character Style Anomaly

It used to be that you could define a character style to merely colour the text and give it an underline (e.g. for Hyperlinks) or just superscript the text (for Reference citations). When such styles, which do not call for a particular font or font size, are placed into InDesign CS, the styled text would take on the font and font size of the underlying paragraph style. However, after placing a Word .doc with these styles into a CS2 template, the font and font size becomes Times New Roman and 10 pt. The solution was to save an .rtf file and re-import the text. Now, in CS3 this work-around doesnt quite work: the font is okay, but the font size reverts to that default size of 10 pt.
So, I would like a script that finds all occurrences of two specific character styles (Hyperlink and bibref) and then corrects the font size of the found text to that of the underlying paragraph style. These styles can appear anywhere within a document, including in tables. I have trawled through this forum and found enough to be able to search for the character styles, but I cannot fathom how to apply the font size of the underlying paragraph style. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
By the way, re-applying the character styles doesnt work because the character styles dont define the font size; also clearing the overrides on the paragraph style while the text is selected isnt a viable solution, because other local formatting (i.e. italic) would be lost.

Hi Peter
Thank you very much for your quick response. I tried your script and it did as you intended by clearing the Font, Font Style and Point Size in the character style, but unfortunately it did not correct the problem of the style becoming some default style and size (Times New Roman 10 pt) when placed into ID.
In fact, I had already set up the 'bibref' and 'Hyperlink' character styles with these fields blanked out. Also, I made Adobe aware of this bug when CS2 came out and they warned me that CS3 wouldn't fix the problem; but I didn't realize that CS3 would be worse than CS2 so that using an rtf file wouldn't fix things.
So, I am left with my initial query: is it possible to write a script to search for the character styles in question and apply the font size of the underlying paragraph style?
Thanks a lot for any help you can give.

[JS][CS3]Applying Character Style to First Word

I am a noob as far as Javascript is concerned, and I was hoping for a little guidance.
Here's my scenario: I have a book that has been typeset all in one file; the main content is all in one story. I want to select the first word of every text frame on each page and apply a character style. My goal is to utilize this character style to indicate page breaks in the XML--I'll map the style to a specific tag.
So far I have this poor specimen:
var myDocument = app.activeDocument;
var myPage = myDocument.pages.item(1);
var myTextFrame = myPage.textFrames.item(0);
if( app.activeDocument.stories[0].paragraphs[0].words[0] != null )
myTextFrame.paragraphs.item(0).words.item(0).appliedCharacterStyle =
myDocument.characterStyles.item('foo');
I know, I haven't set up any sort of loop yet (which will be trickier given the fact that there will be blank versos, etc). What I'm trying to do in this is to select the first word in the first paragraph on the second page--which it does in fact do. Problem is, the first paragraph on the second page starts on the first page, so I'm selecting that a word on the first page, not the second page.
As I said, lots of work to do but a little help on getting to the right word would be most appreciated.

Well, you were on the right track, but testing 'myText' fails if there is no text frame on a page because it fails one line earlier
>var myTextFrame = myPage.textFrames.item(0);
just before this, you should test the number of text frames:
if (myPage.textFrames.length > 0)
... your stuff ..
Only use this if you are absolutely positive there is just a single text frame on each page! A slightly better way would be to always loop over each textframe:
for (frames=0; frames<myPage.textFrames.length; frames++)
var myTextFrame = myPage.textFrames.item(frames);
..etc.
in which case you also don't have to test its length first (the loop will not be executed if there are zero text frames).
[Techy] Since you have only one continuous story, an even better way would be to loop over the textframes of that story alone. You have to identify the story somehow, and I usually click the text cursor in the one I need:
myStory = app.selection[0].parentStory;
or you can rely on the fact that the story starts in the only text frame on page 1:
myStory = app.activeDocument.pages[0].stories[0];
(I think that oughta work.) Then, each frame of this story up till the end can be found in the array
myStory.textContainers
which are usually text frames. You can loop over these using
for (frame=0; frame<myStory.textContainers.length; frame++)
myTextFrame = myStory.textContainers[frame];
..etc.

Help, my character styles palette is blank.

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