🚀 go-pugleaf

Changing the based-on ought not to matter because when the story is re-imported to the original InDesign document, the relationships there will still be intact.

However, if you're looking for a way to pass styles from one document to another that retain these relationships, it does get a bit dodgy. I looked into this a few weeks ago and ended up shrugging my shoulders and living with the limitation.

The essence of the problem is this (from a scripting perspective, but the same holds true in the UI):

When you get the properties of a paragraph style, the based on and next style point at paragraph style objects in the original document.

So, even though you might have created styles with the required names in the new document, they are not the same styles, merely copies. And so the attempt to set those two properties fails. InDesign treats these kinds of failures as benign and doesn't even inform you of the failure. It just does nothing and moves on (this is a two-edged sword because on the one hand it makes things work that would otherwise be a darned nuisance to deal with, but on the other, it makes other things fail without your necessarily realizing that they did fail).

There is one way to pass styles around that doesn't seem to fall foul of this: save a text frame in a library that has samples of all the styles you need and then place that on some other document -- as long as the styles in question aren't already in existence in that new document, the styles from the text frame appear complete with their based-on and next style properties intact.

I suspect that the same would be true if you exported to tagged text and re-imported (so why not when you export to InCopy and reimport -- don't ask me) because the styles are identified by name in tagged text.

The big difference (for me) of using a library rather than tagged text is that when you use a library to import styles, the styles don't not have any Imported flag against them in the palette.

Dave