In the fly-out menu associated with the Paragraph Styles palette, there is a command for Break Link to Style. This will divorce the active paragraph(s) from any paragraph stylesheets.

Alternately, the pulldown menu in the Control bar gives you direct access to the [No Paragraph Style] “style.”

There are similar commands with the Character Styles and Object Styles palettes for character and object stylesheets (or you can just apply [None]).

Is that what you’re looking for?

Sadly not. You know how when you make a new style, many of the attributes have a blank default value? Well if you set them to anything, then there doesn't appear to be anyway to unset them.

So, say you have a paragraph style in which you've set a font size of 14 pt., and you want to apply that style to a bunch of paragraphs of varying font sizes, but you've decided that you really don't want "14 pt." to be a part of the style after all.

Actually, you can't set attributes like size, leading, tracking, etc. to nothing in paragraph styles.

To do that, you need to use character styles.

That’s not correct, dc47.

I think dc47 may be correct. I've just tried leaving the font size blank in a paragraph style and receive an error message.

In this type of situation I typically set a font size in the paragraph style then override it using character styles when I need a variance in size. Hope that helps.

Actually, you can't set attributes like size, leading, tracking, etc. to nothing in paragraph styles.

That sounds correct to me. What you can do is create a new paragraph style and not explicitly set (new) values for these parameters. They then will automatically be inherited from the style it is based on. If there is no designated base style, the values of the default [Basic Paragraph] style will be used.

For Patrick’s problem: You can use the option Reset To Base (in the style options). It will reset all parameters to those specified in the base style. You can’t reset the parameters one by one.

Sorry, I misread his post. Thought it said you can't define size and such in paragraph styles, which you obviously can.

> you want to apply that style to a bunch of
> paragraphs of varying font sizes, but you've
> decided that you really don't want "14 pt."

The whole point of paragraph styles is to apply absolutely identical styles (including point size) to multiple paragraphs. Any variances need to be applied as manual overrides or via character style sheets.

If you want to vary point sizes in different paragraphs but keep them otherwise identical, one solution would be to create one base style and then create other "based on" styles that only vary in point size.

Thanks everyone. This his not a fatal issue for me; I just wanted to keep my Styles palettes tidy.

Rock on.

> I just wanted to keep my Styles palettes tidy.

I know what you mean. Sometimes I've needed to work on an InDesign document created by someone else, and it'll have 27 different paragraph styles, most with unhelpful names like "paragraph style 12", and the styles are applied inconsistently. Drives me crazy!

Related: is there any way to copy text from an ID document without copying it's paragraph and character styles as well?

It's not the copying that's the problem, it's the pasting. Use "Paste Without Formatting" in InDesign, or first paste the text in a program that definitely doesn't support formatting (Notepad, for example), then copy it out of that again.