Clone Adobe InDesign Styles attributes in a blink with a script

Over the years, we have been working with high level press and media corporations. For most of them, it implies setting a XML Workflow within InDesign. Whatever the CMS they are equipped with, whatever the format of the publication is, it’s all about XML.

But as you know it XML is just (or it should be) semantic data without design concerns. In clear english, it’s just text. One could edit a XML file in the simplest text editor and that would be fine. But at some point you need those data to be compelling.

Then come styles within InDesign…

You can create styles and attach them to the XML content to come. That’s called «Map Tags to Styles». Eventually when you import XML content, any tag which was priorly associated to a style will be correctly rendered.

And that’s generally the more exigent part of the process in a XML workflow. You need to create styles and ensure they have the correct attributes and the right association to the tags.

The problem you can face is that sometimes you may have associate a style to a tag and realize that the style is not exactly set as needed. You could of course delete the style and apply the style you wanted. Pick the styles attributes and redefine the style. They are probably many ways to have some style looking exactly as another.

But here is our approach…Yes a script !

We made StylesCloner so we can easily target a source style (the style with the correct attributes but not applied) and the destination style (the one attached to the tag but not correctly set) and have the attributes cloned from the former to the latter.

It’s a minimalistic UI and you will quickly get the idea about how to use it. We hope it will as useful to you as it is to us.

Download StylesCloner