If I were to do that I would lose all the work I'd done to manually set all those fonts and custom line spacing.



I've learned my lesson and in the future, now that I understand more about styles, I'll use Normal style for the English paras, and try and set up a custom style for all the Hindi paras. That way everything will be standardized and systematized.

But for this current book it would be too much to lose all the time and work put into setting up the fonts etc. Could there be a workaround of the sort I described above wherein I create a new custom style called "new" having the attributes of file 3 i.e. 12 pt Times Sanskrit, and could I bring that style into effect at the very site at the end of 'Part 1' where I've created a new page section break for merger of file 3 into 'Part 1'?

No, you wouldn't lose the fonts or, I believe, the line spacings; all that should be 'lost' is the Style information.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Oh, I see. I had thought wordpad was a text editor like notepad. But looking it up in wikipedia I see it is actually a basic word processor that supports fonts. It does say however in wikipedia that wordpad does not support footnotes. I think that may mean that if I were to paste the document into wordpad I would lose all my footnotes, and I have quite a number of them...

Earlier you had suggested that I could have created a special style for the Hindi paragraphs. Couldn't I create such a special style at the end of 'Part 1'; a style that would work with the style settings in my file 3. Is there a way I could take this sort of approach?

That is correct. After round-tripping via WordPad, you'd have no footnotes. However, you could then copy them back into the modified document from your original. You'd also lose heading Styles and the like, too, though their formatting would be retained.

Whichever approach you take with what Charles aptly described as botched documents, there's going to be some pain. If you were to provide more details on what you said about "when I implemented it in my actual document 'Part 1', it created a problem", it might be possible to help you work around that.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

When I changed the Normal style in 'Part 1' to 12 pt Times Sanskrit, then it changed the pt size of all the Hindi words from 11 pt Nirmala to 12 pt Nirmala. To go through 260 pages of text with Hindi words scattered throughout, some as independent paras and some interspersed in English paras, changing all those 12 pt Nirmala words back to 11 pt Nirmala would be a bigger job than having to reformat everything in file 3, which is 12 pages and small by comparison. That is not to say the job in file 3 would be small. Twelve pages of font changes at the word level, with similar changes needed in commas, square brackets, inverted single and double commas, round brackets...this would also be time taking. But not as much perhaps as the 260 pages in Part 1.

A simple Find/Replace could be used to correct any font changes. It's not apparent to me what you mean by:

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Amazing-- I have to test this and see if it works. I hadn't thought of doing a find/replace leaving the find and replace windows empty altogether and only specifying the font type and pt. But I just tried setting up such and find and replace and it seemed to accept it. I didn't execute it, but that would really change my life :-)
I'll make a test copy of my file, implement it, and see if it works.

In reply to your question, the punctuation marks in Nirmala font are not good so I have to switch them all out with Times Sanskrit punctuation. That I do via find/replace as well, but one has to be very careful with it especially with the directional quote marks, as sometimes the find/replace swaps out the wrong direction quote mark. It just takes time to do all this.

If you've already done that in your source documents, that's how they'll be imported, so that really shouldn't be an issue.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

It was feeling like there were a lot of unknown factors involved in changing 260 pages to experiment with, so I went ahead and imported the 12 pages of file 3 and fixed it all by hand.

Next time I'll be very careful to set up the styles properly at the beginning!

Upon completing this book, another will need to be made. How would you recommend that I design such a book with two languages and a separate font for each and different line spacing for each? What would be the proper way to set up the styles?

Use different, perhaps related paragraph styles for the different languages. Do not use "linked" styles.

See also my advice in post #4: https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/...tml#post132494

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

And would these separate Hindi and English paragraph styles each be distinct from the "Normal style"? That is, the Normal style would not be utilized? Or should I make one of the Hindi and English styles the Normal style, perhaps whichever is dominant?

Generally speaking, it's advisable not to use the Normal Style for anything, as so many other Styles inherit characteristics from it. Rather, you might create your own Styles based on the Normal Style and use those.

Accordingly, you'd create separate paragraph Styles for Hindi and English paragraphs (with whatever font, point size, line spacing, etc. each requires), plus character Styles for Hindi and English that you can use for Hindi text in otherwise-English paragraphs and vice-versa.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Wow, that sounds very cool. Will definitely do that next time. I have to learn a bit about how to implement a style once it is created. I guess one would just keep the styles window open and click on the desired style prior to typing a paragraph in which that style is required, to activate the style. Is that the proper idea?