Advanced Features: Import Styles From Reference Calendar

As discussed earlier in regards to the use or styles, the Calendar Wizard focuses on the structure and delegates the 'styling' to InDesign. When the wizard looks to create a style, it first checks to see if the style exists. InDesign also has the ability to import styles. This is a great combination, because it allows the script to first import the styles from another InDesign document and then only create the additional styles it may need.

Therefore, a great practice is to create single month 'reference' calendars. To do so, first start with a single month calendar and style it. Again, it's vital to make changes in the styles rather than using style overrides to adjusting the text or cells directly. Then when creating a new calendar, the option to "Import Styles From Reference Calendar" can be checked. As the wizard starts to create the calendar, it will ask the graphic artist to select the reference calendar and import the styles from it.

One of the challenges with this approach is the wizard only creates styles it needs. For example, if the moon phases are not selected, those styles will not be created. In general, because of the inheritance this probably work out pretty close to what is desired, but there may be a need to adjust styles that were not part of the reference calendar.

Another area to watch out for is the difference between styles for every day on the List calendar. A reference calendar styled without the every day styles will not be able to style a list calendar that does have styles for every day.