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Prevent character style override

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
May 19, 2023
3 replies
1417 views

I have imported text from Word with certain words being styled bold or italic. When I select a style this character styling is most of the times overriden - I can't see a pattern. I know about the + sign and the hold down alt ensure overriding character styles and enforce style, but is an opposite function to ensure "don't override styling"? Some say Cntrl+select style should work, but this doesn't work in current Indesign 18.2. (I'll skip the whole rant about how poorly Word and Indesign work together :-D)

Einar, Norway

Import and export

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer James Gifford—NitroPress

An excellent tool.

Word docs, though, often have a whole laundry list of faults, starting with spot styles and going on to endless duplicate white space. I find it much more productive to do all possible cleanup in Word, with its faster editing and on the fly macros. The less junk you pull into ID, the better... 🙂

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Our late contributor Jongware wrote a script years ago to handle the assignment of styles to locally formatted Word docs after import...

https://creativepro.com/perfectpreptext-a-smart-way-to-style-local-formatting/

James Gifford—NitroPressCorrect answer

Legend

An excellent tool.

Word docs, though, often have a whole laundry list of faults, starting with spot styles and going on to endless duplicate white space. I find it much more productive to do all possible cleanup in Word, with its faster editing and on the fly macros. The less junk you pull into ID, the better... 🙂

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @Einarr1966:

To overcome this (very normal) workflow issue, I run Find/Change queries (saved because I do it often) to search for italics and replace with an Italics character style. Same for bold, small caps, etc. You will need to set up the character styles in the document, and then run the find/changes upon import.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

This. If the Word user is not sophisticated enough to create actual named styles for bold, italic and other "inherent" style overrides (that is, if they're in the 99% of Word users) your first step should be to replace all this spot formatting with named styles.

Most Word docs need significant 'pre-processing' before InDesign can get useful traction with them. Get used to it. 😛

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Honestly, James, I gave up coaching all but the most regular of clients long ago on how to prepare files for me. inDesign's find/change is so robust, I can pinpoint whatever weird stuff is going on in a file and clean it up in minutes. A script like Jongware's would make it even quicker.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Create Character Style in Word and apply it there.

Those styles are imported and InDesign you need only to remove overrides.

E

Einarr1966Author

Participating Frequently

Hi Willi. The problem is most user, like my father, don't use styles in Word, they only use the buttons MS so conventiently display. (He is a professor writing scientific books which I layout.) Is there perhaps a way to ensure this works with all the complex import-settings for text-files - "Import styles automatically" or "Customize styles"? I tried a couple of variations, but neither solved the stripping of character styles.

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

You can make a word in Word italig and in the style panel select all and apply a character style.

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