4.11 CSS Cleanup

It’s time to get into the gnarly topic of CSS cleanup. InDesign’s CSS is dreadful. There is no point pretending anything else. I would strongly suggest that bespoke CSS that is used for, say, your publishing house or a series of books would be well worth your time. In my work for a variety of different publishers and kinds of content, I almost always start from the InDesign CSS which goes some way to mimicking the print design. But I modify that CSS heavily — both for simplicity’s sake but also for complex reasons around accessibility. 

Things to edit out of an InDesign-generated CSS:

• Base body size definitions
• Black colour declarations
• Text-transform:none;
• Widows:1;
• Orphans:1;
• Page-break-before and after instructions
• Compress margin definitions down to one line from four
• Delete all overrides