I've been doing more and more InDesign layouts at work for our architect clients. We often assemble these for the same architects, who do send us "templates." Unfortunately, these templates have formatting styles spottily applied and often existing with overrides, so on the last project, I spent a decent chunk of time to define my own cleaned up, reliable styles.
I won't claim to be an InDesign expert, so I ran into a new task today: grabbing the styles from the last document. It being an Adobe product, I believed it might be a simple copy-paste job similar to Photoshop layer styles, but it's a bit different in InDesign. You essentially have to "import" the styles from the other doc. From either of styles palette menus, clicking on "Load Character/Paragraph Styles..." lets you do this. It's quite straight forward from there on out.
Now this got me thinking about WYSIWYG editors and how the latest version of Word has made Styles a much more obvious tool to users. Unfortunately, I'd bet that the majority of people still have no idea how to use them properly. I would suggest that part of the problem is that the separation between content and styling doesn't fit the mold of a wysiwyg editor, and is better understood through a typesetting software such as LaTeX. But writing in that looks like scary code...
These are just random thoughts of the moment. I've heard rumor that I might be sharing my InDesign knowledge within my office, a scary thought; teaching InDesign to engineers... I wonder if an approach focusing on the separation of styles and content might be of interest to such an audience.
