The answer, usually, is to go back to the paragraph styles panel and rename them, so that they are unique.
In the original project from the client, it was a book made up of 30 different InDesign documents totaling over a thousand pages, and we had over 150 conflicting style names.
We have the same thing happening here, with two conflicting example paragraph styles. It's going to take on the formatting of 1) enumeration. enumeration is going to lose its formatting in the EPUB. That means that anything that was styled 1. InDesign renames them both to the same style, _- enumeration. The paragraph style called 1) enumeration and 1. I'm going to click Ok, you'll see that we immediately get a warning, that says that we have two CSS name collisions. And click Save, the only settings that may matter are the fact that it's set to EPUB 3.0, though the same thing will happen with EPUB 2.0, and in CSS, I've disabled Preserve Local Overrides, which I always do, Include Embeddable Fonts. This only happens when you export free flowable, by the way, not fixed layout. I'm going to go ahead and export this document to EPUB. And you'll get a dialog box warning you about collisions in recent versions of InDesign. And when you have two style names with a different illegal character, it's going to replace them both with the same dash, and so, they're going to merge. But that's all it knows how to do, is replace things with underscores and hyphens. It just replaces the illegal characters with a hyphen, and replaces numbers that start out styles, which you can't use in CSS, with underscores, which is fine. And normally, InDesign deals with that with equanimity. Well, what's served perfectly fine for print and pdf is going to cause problems, because a lot of these characters are illegal in CSS names. This all makes sense to them, this is how they've been creating these files for the past umpteen years. They have the same exact paragraph name such as example preceded with a 1 and a parenthesis, and then they also have an example with an a with two parenthesis, and example with an a and a bracket with a parenthesis following it, and they have an example with a 1 and a backslash. If we look at the paragraph styles for this document, you can see that their paragraph styles are named kind of strangely. This is an actual document from a client that I have obfuscated for this video that shows the style problem and allows me to show you the solution that we came up with. CSS Styles have a much stricter naming convention than InDesign's paragraph styles and that's where you might end up in trouble. Lucky for you, we have a tool that makes it very easy to merge multiple InDesign documents while avoiding some of these problems.- When you export a document to EPUB from within InDesign, InDesign looks at all the paragraph styles and reformats them into CSS styles in the EPUB. A lot could go wrong such as failure to incorporate all the data fields into the merged document. Merging multiple documents into one, as you can see from the tutorial above is not easy. Tips: How to Merge Multiple InDesign Files The problem with this process is that some of the data on the TXT or CSV file can be unavailable on the merged document. In the data merge panel, InDesign will create all the "variables" named in the CSV or TXT file.
Step 4: Set the "Delimiter" and the "Encoding" used in your TXT or CSV file and then click "OK'. Step 3: Click on "Options" and the make sure "Show Import Options" is checked before selecting the file and clicking "Open'. Step 2: In the data merge panel that appears, click on the icon in the upper right corner and then choose "Select Data Source'. Step 1: Open the Data merge panel in InDesign by clicking on "Window > Utility > Data Merge'. Here's how you can import the data source file in InDesign: At the end of the process, the merged document contains the information from the target document repeated as many times as needed to accommodate the data from the CSV or TXT file. You also need the target document which can be an InDesign document that contains the data-field placeholders as well as other items that may remain the same as the merged document.
This information can be in the form of fields and records and therefore a data-source file can be a CSV file or a TXT file. To merge data with an InDesign file, you need the data source file which often contains the varying information in each iteration of the target document. In this article we are going to look at some of the ways you can merge data in InDesign. This feature can be useful when you want to create hundreds of variations of documents like envelopes, mailing labels, and letters very quickly. You can merge various forms of data including CSV files or TXT files with InDesign documents. Merging a data file with InDesign lets you create multiple variations of the same document.