One by one.

... Why would that be a problem? If you have a fairly unique set of attributes that you want to apply to several different runs of text, make it a Character Style and apply at will.

You could use the Eyedropper Tool. Combine with some nifty keyboardbased toolchanging and it is a killer.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

It would be very useful for applying those character styles if you could press, say option key, and select a word from here and a sentence from there... (As you can in Apple TextEdit for example.)

The idea and some comments in Ubuntu developers forum:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3674/

Eyedropper is handy but it doesn't copy styles, only the parameters.

... as you can in Apple TextEdit for example

I'll get my hands on a Mac and try it out. It sounds pretty weird ...

Eyedropper is handy but it doesn’t copy styles, only the parameters.

Aha! Double-click the eyedropper tool to change what it picks up.

Now I see it does copy styles too, great!

I’ll get my hands on a Mac and try it out. It sounds pretty weird ...

NeoOffice Writer lets me select text in parts too. (And it's nothing weird. :)

After seeing it working, I'm pretty sure I could find a use for it in ID. I notice TextEdit pastes the selections on separate lines after a copy -- pretty neat.

A related feature I occasionally miss from my old PageMaker dayz is selecting columns of text. With PageMaker, you could select any text vertically, right out of the middle of running paragraphs, and cut, copy, or format at will.

The thing is, these sort of things are not built-in behaviour. A programmer has to physically work around the "single-selection" paradigm that has been a part of GUIs for ages.