I have been working partly as DTP and templater-in-chief in corporate proposal environments for a number of years. Prior to the linked-style innovation of Word 2007, seeing paragraph styles come back from writers with character style corruptions, i.e., one or more "char"s in the name, multiple versions, etc., became familiar and predictable. I'm less clear about the same and similar phenomena in 2007, though I have read up on it.

I have, for instance, a document based on a nice, clean template I created myself, just returned from authors. One example of the style-botching is this:

Original name:
B2Body_text,bt (The ",bt" allows that keyboard shortcut from the Styles box)

Returned name:
B2Body_text,bt,KBody_text,KBody_Text,Body_Text,Par agraph_Text,Kaan Body,kaa_bt,mo_bt,AMBody Text,KBody_Text Char,KResumeBody_text

Notes:
The K, Kaa, and Kaan come from custom names from another set of templates with their own set of custom styles, perhaps brought by one author. I have no idea where the "mo" or "AM" came from, and wonder what it would take to build up a beaut of an adulteration like this.

In some cases, custom styles which I created based on "no style" have come back in their adulterated form as based on Normal and/or with Normal as the following paragraph style, instead of one of the custom styles I specified in creating the style. Neat trick. Anyone know how?



From my reading, the linked-style business is really nothing other than the char business in polite disguise. My questions have to do with potentially new ways these corruptions may come in or be blocked (leaving aside a locked-style template, which is not an option at present). I often see my custom paragraph style come back from writers as a linked style with a repeating name (not necessarily as long or perverse as the above); I assume that this is indeed the char game. On occasion, this happens even when I bring adulterated text into a clean doc as unformatted text; my clean para style changes to a linked style. That's odd. Perhaps I need to clear all character styles in the paragraph(s) first?

Unfortunately, I can't get all authors to uncheck "Keep track of formatting" and the relevant Autotext style features, which can also contribute to the mess.

I'd be interested in others' similar experiences and anyone's background knowledge of how these gremlins work and any additional tricks of avoiding them. In addition, my experience is that when a para style is turned into linked style, this characteristic becomes grayed-out in the style modification box; that reimporting the para style from the template doesn't change this; and that only going through a full style replacement operation will fix the problem. Is this a fact of life now?

Thanks.