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Montaillou
Montaillou
Participant
May 30, 2019
Answered

Immediate loss of all character styles (italics, bold, etc.) when placing text from Word

  • May 30, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 2107 views

I use InDesign CS6, and have recently had a problem when typesetting chapters in a book that I've never encountered before.

Basically, when placing chapters into InDesign, some of them immediately lose all character formatting (italics, bold). It only happens for some chapters, but not others (each one is supplied by a different author), and it makes no difference if I initially save the Word chapters in .rtf form (a suggestion I saw online somewhere).

Also, I'd perhaps understand this behaviour if it was a problem in one of my paragraph styles, so that applying it stripped out character styles in the original. But the loss of formatting happens IMMEDIATELY - i.e. before I've applied any of the styles I've set up in InDesign to any of the text.

I'd be really grateful if anyone could solve this mystery, as it will save me many hours of manually restoring formatting paragraph-by-paragraph... !

Many thanks in advance.

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer TᴀW

    Try saving the Word document (presuming it's a Word document you're placing?) as a .doc file rather than .docx, and place that. Do the character styles come through that way?

    3 replies

    L
    Community Expert
    LaubenderCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 16, 2020

    Hi Montaillou,

    Ariel had the correct answer for you. Very good!

     

    FWIW: In case you also run into bugs of InDesign's doc import filter there is also a way using a script by Marc Autret that could help, RichPaste 1.7 :

     

    RichPaste | Copy and Paste with Minimal Formatting [UPDATE]
    Marc Autret, April 06, 2016

    http://www.indiscripts.com/post/2015/10/richpaste-copy-and-paste-with-minimal-formatting

     

    Regards,
    Uwe Laubender

    ( ACP )

      wmrowen
      wmrowen
      Known Participant
      August 2, 2020

      Thanks Uwe for the reference to RichPaste! I have one of those frightening Word documents that is now less scary.

      TᴀW
      TᴀWCorrect answer
      Legend
      May 30, 2019

      Try saving the Word document (presuming it's a Word document you're placing?) as a .doc file rather than .docx, and place that. Do the character styles come through that way?

      Montaillou
      MontaillouAuthor
      Participant
      May 30, 2019

      This did work - thanks so much!

      I'm just curious as to why it worked? I maybe should have mentioned I'm using Word 2010 (there are various tweaks they did later which I hate). Anyway, problem solved - thanks again.

      TᴀW
      TᴀW
      Legend
      May 30, 2019

      In my experience, InDesign's .doc import is often more reliable than .docx. Others might disagree, but it's part of my standard workflow to only place .doc files, never .docx.

      JonathanArias
      JonathanArias
      Legend
      May 30, 2019

      are you doing mapping? preserving styles if not mapping to a style?

      can you show us the mapping styles dialog window so we can see what you have going?

      Montaillou
      MontaillouAuthor
      Participant
      May 30, 2019

      Thanks for the quick reply!

      Here's the dialogue box for one of the problem chapters:

      There don't seem to be enough Word Styles to cover the variation - the bold, italics etc. are just applied piecemeal, rather than as proper paragraph or character styles. "Preserve styles if not mapping to a style" sounds like what I'm after - but where do I find that?

      Thanks again...

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