Auto Mapping from Word to Indesign

Hi Emily:

The key to this working is to consistently assign paragraph styles to your Word document. It doesn't matter what style names you use in Word or in InDesign—you map the Word styles to the appropriate InDesign styles. For example, Word's default Heading 1 can be mapped to a heading tag that you called Subhead in InDesign. Dax explained how in the post directly above this one.

I use style mapping regularly with my clients, but honesty struggle with character style mapping. I don't know if it is me or them, so I just direct them to assign all of the paragraph styles, and then to manually apply bold, italic, small caps. Once I import the text (and map paragraph styles) in to InDesign, I run find/change queries to each for the manual formatting and assign the character styles. I have those queries saved so it takes no more than a minute or two.

Finally, in this workflow, I still get overrides. One of the best, yet unappreciated features in current versions of InDesign is the [+] button found at the top of the Paragraph and Characters styles panels. When you click it, overrides show up in blue. Even better, after you have all styles assigned correctly, you can click the ¶+/ button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel to remove them all at once. These two features, along with style mapping, have saved me hours in my long document publishing work.

~Barb

You can set the style mapping when you import the document. Just check the "Show Import Options" and then

Then select Custom Style Import

Then select the appropriate styles to replace when importing.

You might take a look at a plugin called WordsFlow too. It is by EmSoft. It allows dynamic linking of Word docs within InDesign.

- Dax

Have you taken a goid look at the Import Options first? There you can map your Word styles to InDesign styles, or just simply use the Word Styles.