Extremely complex document

[Grundoon Groundhog]

I am struggling with a very complex document: a bibliography of the works of Lewis Carroll. Virtually every entry has multiple formats.

The ID line has an extra bold numeral followed by Italic, Roman or both, and/or all caps, and/or a Gothic font. Each description may include italic, roman, all caps, or small caps. There is a semibold italic introductory run in head at the beginning of each description.

I have tried various ways to retain the formatting when flowing the RTF original into InDesign, keeping or not keeping the formatting, imposing or not imposing the  InDesign styles.

I have done a find/replace to change the flowed document style by style as well as changing the  fonts with the Find/Replace type feature.

The italic and small caps are consistently lost. Changing them tto match the 'Letter.Numeral" style changes the entire line to the paragraph style, thus losing the italic and sometimes but not always the small caps. Short of doing the hundreds of ID numerals by hand, what can i do to retain the styles? Change the numerals by fonts and size rather than the style?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Beware the frumious bandersnatch that is multilevel lists in Word — they are pointlessly complex, freakishly fragile nightmares. Unless they are absolutely meticulously applied, they won't import into ID without flaws.

I would bring the doc into ID as best you can, archive the Word file, and just start developing a style set in ID that does the job, whether or not you can re-use or ride much of the existing formatting. I'd say it's not too extreme to bomb it all to Body copy and format from a clean slate.

InDesign's list system is a bit complex and fussy, but very powerful and has none of the positively antagonistic characteristics of the bandersnatch's.

You can probably make good use of line styles and GREP styles in such a complex layout — study up on both.

ETA: And: do everything you can to think the content through and reduce the formatting complexity. It's easy to get lost down a — heh, heh — rabbit hole trying to get too elaborate.

[Scott Falkner]

This might be something that can be automated with either Nested Styles or GREP Styles. These are paragraph level formatting that applies a character style (like just Bold or just Italic) to only some of the text in a paragaph based on predictable rules, like Bold up to the first colon, or Italic for anything between parenthesis. 

You didn't say whether you are using a word processor to prepare the text but if you are, that may be a good place to start. See if you can define character styles for each of the different formats (bold, italic, bold italic, small caps, blackletter, superscript, etc). then use search and replace to apply the character style to the text with that formatting. This would require the word processor to permit searching based on formatting, something not all word processors can do. Once all the formatting has a character style applied to it you can import the text and the styles will be retained. You can then edit the styles to ensure each it properly formatted.

This has the benefit of letting you fine tune each style.  Attached is an INDD of the text in which I have done the search and replace already. But I did it in InDesign, so any formatting that may have been lost in my import will still be missing.

You can download an IDML here.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

My experience is that it's not worth trying to optimize an import document's structure, styles, formatting etc. for a one-shot project like this; better to bite the bullet, do the best import you can and then do all further work within InDesign. Putting lots of effort into the first stage is only useful if it's for what's to be a repeated task or workflow.

[Scott Falkner]

Bonus tip: When I have a long text thread (and this certainly qualifies) I like to break up the text formatting and editing from the layout. I make a separate InDesign file for just the text so I can edit and adjust without dealing with the layout. Then I just copy and paste the text back into the main file.