Quick paragraph style application transformation ... or reverse engineering a document the hard way?

Hi everyone,
I'm using Indesign 5.5 for Windows and have inherited a technical document with no styling applied (not even text threads or auto-pagination), but all the fonts are in the correct sizes and colours. So it looks ok in print, but trying to actually do anything with it is a nightmare.  For obvious reasons I WANT to apply paragraph styles to the document so I can generate a new auto-updating TOC, maintain and add to it, and all the other good stuff that means.
My question is this - is my only choice to go through page by page and apply new styles (matching their current appearence) to every different heading and bullet point, or is there a nice easy way (or script) that i can use to whizz through the document for me, neatly applying a new style to each different font variety or element it finds (not altering their appearence) and leaving me with a nice list of styles I can rename (then take all the credit for? ha!) Basically take a document that's already been put together wrong, and make it right? I think this might've been imported into InDesign from something like Quark, hence the state it's in, but I don't have access to anything but this version. Any help you could offer would be great.  Oh, and if (as I suspect) my only option is indeed to apply all the styles manually one line at a time, then feel free to point and laugh, I doubtless deserve it.
Thanks!
Phil

If you need to reproduce the existing page layouts, I'd suggest you read up more on what paragraph styles can do, before annihilating whatever layout and flow behaviors have been stuck on the content. For example, if level "X" headings always start at the top of a text frame, or top of a page, or even top of a right page, or top of a left page, a paragraph style property can do this. So you'd want to create and apply a paragraph that does this to those paragraphs before you thread text frames; the top of <whatever> frame paragraph property will keep the paragraphs in place.
It is possible to create paragraph styles with properties that behave crazily when they do what you define for them. For example, you can define a paragraph style that sets the style of the paragraph that's created when you press Enter/Return. You can also use the smartness built into the Next Style property. If a paragraph style, say Head1 is defined to create a new paragraph when you press Enter/Return, it can also apply its next style property to the paragraph follows Head1 in the same text selection. So, if you select a paragraph that's supposed to become Head1 (which defines its next style as BodyAfterHead1) and also select the paragraph that follows it,  and then hold down Ctrl+Click on the Head1 style's name in the Paragraph Styles panel, Apply "Head1" then Next Style appears. If BodyAfterHead1 defines Body as its next style, and more than two consecutive paragraphs are selected, Head1 will be applied to the first paragraph, BodyAfterHead1 will be applied to the second paragraph, and Body will be applied to the third and following paragraphs.
So, you'll be investing in setting up the Next Style property for paragraph styles, and selecting as many consecutive paragraphs as needed for applying a pattern of styles that agrees with your next style definitions. Each time you use this feature, you're collecting benefits from your investment.
If you need to reproduce the look of the layout on some number of pages, you could export to PDF and use a script to efficiently place each page of a multi-page PDF on a "PDF layer" you create, that appears on every document page in the ID document, lock and move the layer below the active document layer, and use it as a placement underlay.
Search Google for terms like "InDesign apply style and next style," "InDesign place multipage pdf script," "InDesign installing and using scripts," "InDesign paragraph style keep options," and "InDesign start paragraph options," without quotes, for informative links to anywhere on the Web, as well as on these Adobe forums. To limit the searches to Adobe forums only, include "forums.adobe" without quotes in the search query.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

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