A few points... I have a freeware tool called HuntOverrides that gives you a list of pgfs with overrides. It generates a hypertext list of pgfs that have overrides. You can navigate to them and fix them. Find it at cudspan.net...
It occurred to me to make a tool that wipes out overrides, but for a full doc or book I think you can do that via Import Formats. So I never bothered. I guess it could make sense to make a tool like that, but I probably won't get around to it. On a similar vein, it would be easy to make a tool that reapplies the catalog format for the current pgf. You could also make it wipe out any properly applied char formatting, I suppose (maybe two different choices). Still, I'm not making so many tools these days, so I may not get around to that for a while... There's one problem with applied char formatting, whether from the catalog of ad-hoc. If you apply formatting to the last character in a paragraph, then it applies that to the pgf symbol as well. So you might make the pgf symbol bold. In that case, the formatting is kind of sticky, and you usually have to click around a bit before you can remove that formatting from the pgf. For that reason, I *always* add an extra space at the end of a pgf if I need to format the last word in it. I also happen to have a tool that maps new templates to legacy documents. It turns out I have to add a space at the end of every paragraph if I'm swapping out char formats, for this very reason. Otherwise, the tool ends up not knowing when a char format has ended. My bug, or FrameMaker's? Who cares... HTH (but probably doesn't) cud