Need some beginner help on formatting and images

Question

Just getting started with ID so am going through the learning process and could use a little help getting past some of the road bumps.
Are ID character and paragraph styles similar in use and effect as those in Word? In other words, are there important differences in when to use text styles and paragraph styles? Do they cascade? Did I make a mistake by setting up two styles, one character and one paragraph, and applying them to a paragraph? Is there a good practice anywhere where you don't use a paragraph style to set character styling but instead use a character style and a paragraph style together?
Get the idea? I'm looking for sort of an ID styling 101.
Thanks in advance
Tom

Answer 1

No Style is not a style. It is a lack of style. It exists in the list of
styles because there has to be something there to choose from when you
choose to base a style on nothing, or when you want to *not* apply a
paragraph style to a paragraph. When you don't want any style, you want
no style (hence the name). The only time I deliberately apply No Style
to a paragraph is when I want to "lock down" the formatting so that it
won't change if I change a style (because No Style has no definition to
change).
Basic Paragraph is a special style that can't be deleted from the list
of styles. For my books, I like to make a text style, give it a name
like "text", and then base everything on that. As far as I can tell, the
danger in basing everything on Basic Paragraph is simply that you may
have it defined differently in another document and if you copy material
from one document to another, everything will change (because everything
is based on Basic Paragraph and Basic Paragraph is defined differently).
Again, as far as I can tell, this is no different than having two
documents, both basing everything on a style called "text" and defining
"text" differently in those two documents. Either way, if you copy
styled text from one document to another, you may see changes if the
style exists in both documents and is defined differently.
Your particular workflow depends mostly on the people you're working
with. It's certainly possible to set up a Word template containing all
the styles your writers will need and then tell them to use them. Then
you won't have to do anything except Place the Word file. My experience,
though, is that 99% of Word users don't even know styles exist, so this
may require some education...
In my workflow, I almost always get Word files after they've been
written (and usually formatted to death). I Place Word files, keeping
formatting, and then search and replace the formatting that I want to
keep for styles and then select all and Clear Overrides. This way I get
to keep the author's hard work but dump all the garbage the author
introduced.
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com