Easiest way to conform styles of multiple manuscripts?

[New Daddy]

What is the easiest way of conforming styles (fonts, types, line spacing, etc.) of multiple manuscripts written by multiple authors?

A journal at my school is thinking of going self e-publishing, but one of the many issues to overcome is dealing with manuscripts with all these different styles.

[HansV]

If the authors have formatted their documents by applying styles, it is doable: you can transfer the styles from a template to a document.
But if they have applied direct formatting, it will be very difficult to unify the documents - it would require lots of editing.
So for existing documents, it depends on the way they have been formatted.
For future documents, it would be best to provide a template, and to instruct the authors to avoid direct formatting, and to use the styles from the template.

[macropod]

When a document's creator has creatively overridden Word's Styles or have used Styles other than those you want to use, it is often simpler to copy the content & paste into another document (attached to the appropriate template) as unformatted text, then apply your Styles to achieve the desired result. Keeping the original on hand while you're doing this can help correctly identify headings, indents, etc. For tables that are to be transferred, you might want to remove any text formatting before copying & pasting as formatted text.

[Rudi]

In addition to the above, I tend to follow Macropod's advice when I need to "clean" up custom styled documents to conform them to a new format, but I incorporate the cleanup options in the Style Inspector. Depending on the level of cleanup, one can use the paragraph or character cleanup options to remove specific levels of formatting. In most cases (with the types of cleanup I tend to do), I find removing the character styles only to be be most handy. This allows me to preserve formatting like bulleted lists, custom character formatting like bold, italic and underline, and font colours. Thereafter I apply the necessary paragraph styles back onto the document again.

Before:

SC019.jpg

After:

SC020.jpg

[Charles Kenyon]

The simplest way is to start from documents based on the same template with styles defined and have the users use those styles.

Dream on...

I know that like macropod, I often simply paste the text as plain (unformatted text) and apply styles.