Option to replace matching text styles on paste/import

[Daniel Gibert]

Currently in Publisher, when you paste text with paragraph/character styles that already exist in the document, it could happend two possible things.

1. If the parameters of the incoming style matches the existing one's, it uses the existing ones.
2. If the parameters of the incoming style differs on any single aspect from the existing one's, it adds the imported style to the style list, adding a number to it.

So you probably end with a document with myriad of redundant styles that you must search, change and clean. I know that you can do this with the search/replace panel but it is a big nuisance, specially on large documents when you are copy/pasting a lot from other documents. Also, I understand why this the default behavior, there are times when you want to preserve the singularity of the pasted text.

But i'd love to have an option to disable this behavior and simply get the pasted styles replaced by already existing ones, no questions, no duplicates, no intervention. For example, just now I'm doing a catalog that differs on little things from the one i'm importing content from, maybe a font color, or different tabs configuration, but uses the same style names for the same kind of paragraphs. It would be fantastic to simply paste from the old catalog and have the matching styles be nicely replaced without intervention.

Is could be a simple preference setting like this: [  ] Replace already existing styles on paste/import

Or maybe this option already exist and i'm not capable of finding/noticing it…

[garrettm30]

I do agree. The multiplying of styles that happens here is more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Along those lines, it would also be welcome if Publisher suggested assigning a different style when you delete one style. For example, if you were to delete a copy style, if the style was in use, a little message would pop up offering the option to replace all instances of the style to be deleted with another style of user's choice.

[Daniel Gibert]

11 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

I do agree. The multiplying of styles that happens here is more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Along those lines, it would also be welcome if Publisher suggested assigning a different style when you delete one style. For example, if you were to delete a copy style, if the style was in use, a little message would pop up offering the option to replace all instances of the style to be deleted with another style of user's choice.

Amen to that too!

[Daniel Gibert]

Oh my! our customer just ordered us to rearrange a whole catalogue, so we will copypasting content from different files which share style naming. The only difference on those styles is the accent color, but be prepared to have thousands of iterations of styles as it is adding a new numbered style each time we paste a single item. This is going to be a nightmare. Imagine, 12 documents, 500 pages, 3500 products products going from one to another file and Publisher not replacing pasted styles with the ones already existing the target. It is gonna be literally hours of cleaning and re-stilyng. Please, Affinity, add an option to use the already existing styles on pasting. This is gonna be horrible.

Just as simple as that: Use the existing style if the name match on pasting.