Eliminate Basic Paragraph style
Please eliminate the Basic Paragraph Style. Don’t just allow users to delete it (but if nothing else, at least do that). Remove the style from new documents and don’t have it in the panel by default.
The style is a trap. Users who edit the style or use the style and base other styles on Basic Paragraph usually fall into a trap when copying and pasting text between documents that have different definitions of the style. The text will paste in with different formatting that in the source document. When this happens there are usually one of two reactions: “How the heck did that happen?” or “Oh, silly me forgetting to never use that annoying feature.” but never “Oh good, that’s exactly what I expected.”
Professionals know to never use the style, never edit the style, and never base other styles on Basic paragraph. If you have a feature that professionals know to never use that is a very good clue that it is a bad feature and should be removed. Please do so.
Scott Falkner | ACP
shared this idea
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Sharon
commented
I create graphics for other peoples documents. This is an issue every week. I make a point to make sure my styles are not based on the Basic Paragraph Style, and I still run into issues. No matter how clean I try to keep my file, it still reverts to Minion Pro.
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m1b
commented
We had [a discussion related to this topic](https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-losing-style-settings-when-pasting-text-to-new-document-text-with-unidentified-overrides/m-p/14333610).
I suspect the best solution might be for Indesign to ensure the [No paragraph style] is a constant across all instances of Indesign on all systems, and that [Basic Paragraph Style] should be the “default” style if users want such a thing. That way serious uses can safely base their styles on [No paragraph style] with causing the problem mentioned in the discussion I link to.
In other words I think the root of this problem may be that Editing the font/style *with no document open* currently seems to edit [No paragraph style], but it should edit [Basic Paragraph Style]. I’m not 100% sure I’ve understood the under-the-hood situation, but that is my guess.
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Anonymous commented
Or at least make a "no style" option available.
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Bevi Chagnon | ACP
commented
The problem is not just with [Basic Paragraph].
The better solution is to give us the option of what to do with incoming styles. Let us choose:
— Overwrite the existing style with the incoming style's definition.
— Keep the text, but use the existing style's definition.
— Keep the text, and make a new style of the incoming style.No need to delete or eliminate any of the [Basic] styles (object styles, too). When you understand how to use them, they are powerful tools.
But we do need to be able to control what happens when we import ALL styles into existing layouts.