Word Text placed into InDesign formatting issues

Question

We create pharmaceutical leaflets from approved text in different languages

supplied onWord Docs.
We place the text into the InDesign file and change font and font sizes, but keeping the reg, bold and italic formatting. Sometimes the bold and italic doesn't convert properly, or we may have a word that is half regular and half bold. This can be when it follows a character such as hash in the text. Is there any way we can get a better result?

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

Word import is a highly developed and mature process... that is still imperfect mostly because of issues at the Word end. (Very few Word docs are created in a truly clean and professional manner.)

The very short answer here is to become highly familiar with the Word import dialog, which comes up when you Place a Word doc with the (easy to overlook) 'Show Import Options' box in that dialog checked.

Most longer answers here will give various advice as to settings and methods used with this import filter, but if you learn the whole thing comprehensively, it will be of great value for your workflow.

The other end of this process, for better import results, is to 'pre-process' the Word doc to clean it up and give ID better hooks to work with. An example is to replace ALL spot formatting with styles, even/especially the native bold and italic.

But yes, it is possible to get more reliable, pre-formatted results from Word import. It's just that much of it goes against the usual sloppy Word document prep. 🙂

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