I audit a lot of InDesign documents. The most common problem I find isn't missing styles or inconsistent type — it's styles that are applied but overridden to the point of being meaningless.
Here's what I mean. A designer creates a paragraph style called "Body Copy" with the correct font, size, leading, and tracking. Then, to make a specific paragraph a bit looser, they manually increase the tracking. The style shows as applied, but the formatting override means the text doesn't actually match the style definition.
Now try to run automation on that document. Your script queries all text with the "Body Copy" style — and gets that text, with all its individual overrides still in place. The automation assumes the text follows the style; it doesn't.
Why this matters for automation
Automation is reliable only when documents are consistent. Consistent documents require styles without overrides. If you want to be able to script anything significant — batch find-replace, automated layout updates, data-driven workflows — your documents need to be clean.
The override indicator is your friend
The plus sign (+) in the Paragraph Styles or Character Styles panel next to a style name means there's an override. It's easy to ignore. Don't.
My rule: if I see a plus sign on a style, I ask whether the override should be made part of the style definition, become a new style variant, or be removed. The answer is almost never "leave it as a manual override".
Character styles, not local formatting
The most common violation I see is italic applied as local formatting rather than as a character style. Yes, it looks the same on screen. But if you ever need to find all italic text programmatically, or apply a different italic face, or export structured content, the distinction matters enormously.
Apply italic via a character style. Name it "Italic" or "Emphasis" or whatever your system uses. One click, consistently.
Nested styles are underused
For predictable pattern formatting — "the first word of each paragraph in small caps, followed by the rest in regular weight" — InDesign's nested styles can apply this automatically within a single paragraph style. Most designers do this manually. Most designers also have to redo it every time the content changes.
The audit process
When I take on a document that will need scripting, I do an audit first: count paragraphs with overrides using a script (faster than visual inspection), find all unique formatting combinations that don't have corresponding styles, and check character styles vs. local character formatting.
Usually I find 20–40% of text has overrides that need resolution. Cleaning this up before building automation saves significant debugging time later.
The philosophy is: styles are contracts. They say "all text with this style will format this way". Breaking that contract breaks everything downstream.