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Working with a large book ms in Word, something I've done many times, but this time I have encountered something I don't recall seeing/dealing with before.
I am working through import iterations and mapping the Word styles to newly defined ID styles. Everything is fine except that ID is retaining local formatting on each of these styles. Every BODY paragraph, for example, is retaining things like the original font and size as well as trivial settigns like hyphenation. Every character style is properly defined and applied, but the text retains the formatting of the original as a spot override.
Is there a way to force a style redefinition to clear local spot formatting, both paragraph and character? It appears to affect nearly all the paragraphs of the book, and I'm not sure I've ever seen this before. I really can't Clear Overrides on every single one...
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Hey, James. I hear you. I had this happen to me with mapping a few months ago with version 17.2.1. Is this happening with 17.3? I must have tried 10 different ways to map it in right and couldn't get anything to stick. My Word document was totally clean to begin with (since I'm the one who set it up) and I've done mapping dozens and dozens of times before with no issues. I tried converting text to rich text, .doc instead of .docx, all the other "tricks" but in the end, I manually cleaned and corrected the styles because I was out of ideas and had to get started. I haven't done a big map like that since, but I think something is wonky. I don't know of any way to force style redefinition to clear local spot formatting for either paragraph or character. If there is one, I'd like to know, too. I am going to go through mapping again soon with a new book project. BTW, I use MS Office Home and Business 2019.
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Okay, thanks, at least I know it's not me and I have not imagined doing this seamlessly before.
The solution, besides a lot of really tedious style mapping (I've been able to be sloppy about this in the past and fix things as I go in the ID doc), is to do Find/Replace on each style as I encounter it. Search for paragraph return in BODY, replace with paragraph return in BODY, all BODY paragraphs (and all correctly-mapped character styles within) fixed. Kind of sledgehammer but it works, and I am on a tight deadline for this one.
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Heh, I feel the same way... misery loves company, as they say. I am rather compulsive about not having any style overrides in my documents at all. I think you'll agree, this ultimately helps when exporting to ePub to get clean HTML. Maybe it doesn't matter in the long run, but old habits die hard. I use a full PreFlight check to warn me for overrides without ignoring anything. On that project, I ended up getting the best map I could, and then I went through all the override errors to apply the correct character style. It became a meditation, lol. A 600+ page book! I used Find/Replace for a lot of these as well. I'm curious what I'll encounter with this next time.
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This is a dual format book, so it has to be meticulous. So, lots of slogging this weekend.
Amusingly enough... it's about AI.
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Well, good luck, and thanks for bringing it up. I didn't want to mention it myself at the time because I, too, briefly questioned my memory that I had always done this seamlessly before.
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Did you Select All and click the Clear Overrides in Selection button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel?
~Barb
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Thanks, Barb, yes, I tried that, but it removed the imported italics which wouldn't map to my italics character style.
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Similar results. It cleans up "too much."
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Exactly. That's what I mean by I couldn't get the mapping to "stick" and in some trials with different settings, I had the same thing happen as you explain here, "Every character style is properly defined and applied, but the text retains the formatting of the original as a spot override."
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Sorry--I'm not clear--did you use Character styles in Word?
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While a Select All and Clear overrides works, it removes ALL formatting. So, if you have a paragraph that has bolds and italics, it removes them and make it all regular text. I watched a video with Terry White (the so-called Adobe evangelist) and his method was to use Style mapping on import. Doesn't work. Other than fixing this issue manually (total waste of time) I don't know how to get around InDesign's total ineptness.
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The waste of time, measured in millions if not billions of man-hours, and ineptness, as evidenced by count of users, is Word's encouragement to use spot formatting. 🙂
It's not that hard to remap bold, ital, b-ital and (if you must) underline in a few Find/Replace operations.
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If you use Paragraph and Character styles in Word, it works fine. I still have to do a select all and clear overrides since Word files can be messy.
Note: I do not recommend using Word's Linked styles.
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Yes, if you have the applied styles to begin with, mapping them is trivial. However, more people eat parsley than use character styles in Word.
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Regardless of one's parsley eathing habits, while not as complex as InDesign, Word is a complex program.
If one imports manually formatted text or simply formats it manually in InDesign, what should one expect when one clears manual formatting?
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We seem to be arguing that the sky is blue. 🙂 The origin post here seems to be that clearing overrides on import, oddly enough, clears override formatting. If a Word user is in the 0.1% and used defined styles for bold, italic, etc. then mapping them on import is trivial... but if they're in the majority of non-parsley eaters, they will have used Word's speedy spot formatting, which must be converted to styles or lost as overrides.
Word is not especially complex at the typing-stuff-with-some-accents level, but I've never seen a Word book of any level that didn't all but dismiss character styles and promote spot formatting as "the way it's done." Over the years, I even noted "mastering" level books that all but dismissed styles as being for fussy structuralists or as starting point conveniences.
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These non-parsley eaters have obviously never taken one of my Word or InDesign classes! 😜
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Or any but the "open Word and start typing classes."
I may have said before, but I was business/IT/telecom/tech for a co-owned business with about 100 employees, 25 or so of whom used Word daily to generate and update reports that could grow to 100 pages over time. For over a decade, I watched these intelligent, creative, highly-focused people battle with broken files and faulty technique, often doing things like sitting up until midnight reformatting reports one manual heading fix at a time. Or dealing with corrupt files and all but retyping them. Or waiting cumulative hours for the bloated monsters to upload or download (slow internet days). (And multiplying entities unnecessarily by emailing the same reports around and around, but that's not a Word problem.)
But none of them, including the *ahem* most senior and controlling co-owner, had time for a few hours of basic training to avoid file problems, use basic styles (ten would have done it) or follow any of the other fairly simple "hygiene" practices that would have saved literally hundreds of hours a month at their basic secondary task.
It was in that era that I learned the fundamental Word user mindset, which was reinforced by most books and training courses. Nothing much has changed in the erm erm erm 15 years since.
But it was from the very best serial book I ever found, an updated series something like "Beat Word/Excel/etc. Into Submission," that explained how to strip, rebuild and turn Word into a lean, mean language tool, that I acquired the most basic rule, still unfortunately valid today: Ignore all the crap promoted by the marketing department and bring all the real tools and functions to the fore.
Which includes adding Bold, Itallic and BoldItalic charactrer styles to your base template and mapping them to the appropriate keys. But that just led to 15 years of students and clients, facing the same messy work problems, throwing fits that they didn't need to learn this fancy-dancy crap, they just wanted to type their report/memo/paper/book/newsletter the way the one book they skimmed said they could.
Sigh.