InDesign paragraph styles problem

Question

I'm typesetting a document in InDesign, copy/pasting from a TextEdit file that I copy/pasted into from a client-supplied PDF. Not sure if its the greatest workflow, but I collated all the text from the PDF into the TextEdit file because the PDF didn't have editable text, and so I could have all of the text in one place (and not use Word). I thought this would strip the text to as close as plain text as could be, so when I paste it into InDesign, I could apply a Paragraph style with no problems. But when I'm doing this, I'm getting colors that aren't even in the Paragraph style that I'm applying:

and the formatting seems to be almost random in different instances and I don't know why. I thought I could override whatever was going but no errors are showing up in the Paragraph styles panel in any of the cases:

So not sure what to do or why its doing that, and where purple is coming from when its nowhere in the style? Maybe missing something simple but I don't know what.

Answer 1

I do this often for PDFs, but I use BBEdit rather than TextEdit to ensure I'm stripping all formatting. In fact, I'll even save a Word file as Plain Text to strip it's formatting.

I suspect TextEdit is using Rich Text not Plain Text and Rich Text can contain format settings such as color size, etc. You can alter the preferences for TextEdit to use Plain Text rather than Rich Text, at least when saving. I'm not 100% certain about when working in TextEdit.

I often find it easiest to.....

• copy all the text
• Paste into an InDesign text frame
• Select all
• Apply my already configured "general" paragraph style to it all (actually apply and "Clear Overrides")
• Then go through changing styles as needed.