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rschlegel
Inspiring
Oct 31, 2022 12:53 AM UTC
Answered

Retaining italic type style when importing from a Word doc

When I import text from a Word doc into InDesign, it retained all type styles except italics. How can I retain italics when importing text from a Word doc?

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James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPressCorrect answer
Legend
Nov 7, 2022 8:05 PM UTC
I want to import my 550 page Word doc into Adobe InDesign, where I can
manually REAPPLY italics. However, If there is any way to automate this,
that would save me weeks of manual labor to my 550 page doc!

Ron

Easy. And unless you want to, you don't have to manually reapply anything.

 

  1. Create a character style named Italix in Word. Give it the characteristic of Italics, with no other font or style changes.
  2. Use Search and Replace to find every italic character, and Replace it with the same character but applying the Italix style.
  3. The Word doc should now import and bring the Italix style and all its applications with it; tweak the style as needed to get the results you want with that character style, on every instance at the same time.

 

Again, though, if the font you are using in ID doesn't have italics — some don't — you will have to either change fonts or use a "fauxtalic" style that applies about 10 degrees skew to the letters instead of an italic face. Switching to a genuine italic is almost always preferable, though.

 

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7 replies

Shanpub
Inspiring
Oct 31, 2022 4:41 AM UTC

Check the following things to sort out this issue

  1. Cross check Italic style in the word file
  2. Clear override style
  3. Select an italic word and check the Character Styles do you get (+) next to italic or like the following screenshot?

     

  4. In your word file, is italic style standard text or Hyperlink?
  5. Open the Find/Change window in Basic Character Format select italics and replace with the same as the below screenshots and then clear overrides.

     


     

 

Check it out and let us know what the issue is.

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rschlegelAuthor
Inspiring
Nov 7, 2022 6:18 PM UTC

I should clarify that I did not use Word's Styles. I only set some text to italics and bold, and these did not retain when imported to InDesign. I imagine there is no way to retain these manual styles when importing to InDesign. 

 

Let me kmow if ther is a way. 

 

Ron

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James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
Nov 7, 2022 6:33 PM UTC

"Always use styles." It's that simple.

 

Using Word's spot overrrides to format text is extremely poor practice, and doubly so if you intend to import it into another app for further formatting and work.

 

The one exception is that you can usually get by with the spot overrides for bold and italic (and underline, which IMVHO is a typewriter-era markup and should no longer be used in typeset materials). ID and other apps will interpret these correctly. But the truly bulletproof, pro way to do it is create specific character styles for these, as @Shanpub outlined. That will work as well or better than the spot formatting, and give you a hook in ID to find, update and fine-tune these highlights.

 

(I further recommend that when you do this, in either Word or ID, give such styles a unique name — Bolded instead of Bold, Italix instead of Italics, etc. This will keep any automatic formatting or defaults from messing up the styling.)

 

I think your lack of italics might be that you are using a font that doesn't have an italic variant, or has a naming error. If you were to look at a word that should be italicized, you might find that an override is applied, but ID is doing nothing since it can't map an italic face to the style.

 

Go back to Word, create those character styles, and use search/replace to replace every instance of spot formatting with them.

 

And, really, while you're at it, make sure paragraph styles are universally and consistently applied to the whole document, with no spot formatting used.

 

"Alway use styles." Rule number one.

 

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