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G
Grundoon Groundhog
Inspiring
April 22, 2024
Question

Flowed text acquires undesired styles

  • April 22, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 1937 views

I am working on a bibliography whose text includes all the usual font weights plus some words in all caps, some in small caps. Variations are from paragraph to paragraph. The Word document has been prepared to accommodate these differences. When it is flowed into InDesign, many peculiar things happen. Entire paragraphs are all caps, are italics, are both etc. No character styles have been applied. There should be one for the first word of the paragraph; this is not applied with the paragraph style. When the text is flowed in  the various caps, italics, small caps etc. must be maintained while allowing the regular text to be regular text.

 

I just checked a previous version, and this problem was not occurring. I did change the font, but surely that wouldn't cause this problem?

 

Why would this happen? What do I do? I' am attaching the original Word document and the InDesign document. Any help greatly appreciated.

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1 reply

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
April 22, 2024

I haven't looked at the files, but are the applied overrides in Word assigned character styles, or just spot overrides? If the formatting is spot overrides, it can be hard for the import to follow the changes. The reliable method is to use ONLY defined character styles for these running changes, and that includes bold, italic and underlilne. (That is, there should be defined character styles named Bold, Italic, BoldItalic, etc., and not a reliance on even Word's spot formatting for these things.)

    G
    Grundoon GroundhogAuthor
    Inspiring
    April 22, 2024

    Unfortunately the text is being copyedited and I don't know if those styles have been applied in the Word documents. It would be impossible to impose them in InDesign as there are so many occurrences of each format. Would overriding overrides in ID work somehow?

    G
    Grundoon GroundhogAuthor
    Inspiring
    April 23, 2024

    If the styles aren't being consistently applied in Word, then they will have to be manually cleaned up in InDesign, a very tedious process that will need meticulous proofing.

     

    There are no shortcuts for importing from Word. Either the source file is cleanly formatted (using styles) and free of corruption, or it will have to be fixed at one or both ends to get a satisfactory result. There's no "magic method" that can get past a messy or glitchy input file.

     

    Fixing it in ID, using carefully defined styles, and proofing it against a PDF provided by the source/author is the only second way that doesn't involve having the source proof the material for correction in InDesign.


    That's what I was afraid of. But it flowed perfectly yesterday in a different version of the document.

     

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