No text style overrides (exceptions)

This GreenLight check flags any text in InDesign that been ‘overridden’ from its base Paragraph and Character Styles. Exceptions can be made.

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The efficient use of Paragraph and Character Styles greatly improves consistency and speeds up formatting in InDesign, especially for long or complex documents.

When a text style is applied to the words on the page it is still possible to modify the text manually e.g. by modifying the font, size or styling.

If text has been altered by hand in this way InDesign refers to it as a style override (aka ‘local formatting’). You can see where style overrides occur in an InDesign document by choosing InDesign Window menu > Styles > Paragraph Styles or Character Styles and selecting the Style Override Highlighter button. Any such text become highlighted with cyan as a result:

The Style Override Highlighter button with text highlighted in cyan in the document

With this check, GreenLight can take you to the location on the page where overridden text is to be found and highlights it. Exceptions can be made where required.

GreenLight's dialog when a check has detected style overrides

Fix this by converting Paragraph Style overrides (such as emboldening or italicising text) to Character Styles where possible — again for consistency and efficiency. This process can be sped up using Find/Change from InDesign Edit menu > Find/Change.

Alternatively you can remove overrides from the selected text by clicking the Clear Overrides button in Paragraph and Character Style panels.

The 'Clear Overrides' button in InDesign's Paragraph Styles pane

GreenLight offers a Clear all text style overrides tool to remove text overrides throughout a document in one click (from GreenLight Tools menu > Typography tools panel > Clear all text style overrides).

Adobe InDesign help on applying and removing text style overrides