Formatting problem importing text from Word to InDesign

[deboradangelo]

Hi! I work in publishing and I lay out several books. I usually receive the texts in Word, and I insert them into Indesign with menu > file > insert > keep formatting.

This method has been excellent so far to keep the terms in italic, bold, etc. Lately I've been having big problems instead, because the formatting is not maintained and large parts of the text, or the entire book, are imported into Indesign in an entirely italic or small caps style, even though in Word there is apparently no setting of this type (except for some terms, which I would like to keep, but not on the entire text).

I can't understand what the source of the problem is, and I can't manually re-insert all the formatting from scratch for time reasons.

I had the same problems with different Word files, cominig from different people, and I've tried using different Indesign documents, the problems remain. I use original and licenced for both Adobe and for Microsoft software. I am currently using Indesign 2025 on MacOs Ventura 13.7.2.

Can anyone help me?

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from using the community">

[Willi Adelberger]

You have to work with styles and not with manually formatting.

Create styles in Word.

Create styles in InDesign.

Import Word text via File > Place …, use the option button to map styles.

Be aware that MS Office installs fonts inside the Application. Those fonts are not available to other applications.

Don't use copy and paste, use only place.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@deboradangelo 

Most likely - your "word" doesn't originate from WORD - but from some other application.

Try re-saving this "word" file as RTF or DOC(X) in the "real" WORD.

If you want to just preserver Bolds / Italics / etc. - the basics - you can use set of Macros for WORD that I've co-reated:

http://id-tasker.com/uploads/WordStyle.zip

Should work perfectly fine in WORD on a Mac.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

All of the above. As simple as it might seem it should be, and as easy as it can be, the truth is that Word and InDesign have only an uneasy relationship, and you have to regard "Word" files as a first approximation of something you can import successfully.

Flawed format and structure from being produced and edited by Word clones/compatibles like Google Docs, Pages, etc. is only a first problem in that most word-managing apps don't do a very compatible job of export/conversion/saving to formal Word standard.

That 90% of Word users use sloppy formatting techniques and never take any steps to purge accumulated save data from their files is much of the remaining problem.

Get used to pre-processing Word submissions to ensure compatible format and replace sloppy/spot formatting and lack of consistent style usage if you don't want to spend a great deal more time trying to fix messy imports in ID.It's not a problem that's going to get better, especially (for one thing) because of the increasing propensity to run writing through AI systems that might add yet more structural and formatting problems.

[Barb Binder]

menu > file > insert > keep formatting

Confirming that this means File menu > Place > Show Import Options > Preserve File and Formatting from Text and Tables?

If yes, can you share a page or two of a problem file so that I can take a look? For privacy, you can click my name and message it to me directly, or just use:

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~Barb

[Joel Cherney]

I can't understand what the source of the problem is, and I can't manually re-insert all the formatting from scratch for time reasons.

Lots of possible sources for this issue, and they're challenging to figure out without getting one's hands dirty up to the elbows, which is why Barb wants to see a sample file, and also why Robert wants to pre-process the Word file using VBA macros. Most likely, you should have been doing lots of cleanup in Word before importing as per James, and then mapping styles as per Willi. 

My personal preferred pre-import hygiene is not to do a good job in Word, as these fine folks suggest, but instead to kill it with fire. There's so much extra, well, crap in a Word file that I like to avoid using Word docs whenever possible. So when someone sends me a Word file, I want to get it as close as possible to raw text before I even think about bringing it into InDesign. 

So, if you're the kind of person who likes automating document pre-processing as far as possible, let me suggest pandoc. It's not really meant for graphic designers as such; it seems to be more of a tool for getting text in and out of Markdown format. But, if all you want to preserve from your wonky Word docs is the text with its local styling like italic and bold and such, it does a fine job of ingesting Word .docx files and spitting out InCopy files which you can then easily place in InDesign. I couldn't tell you, in your case, if you'd need to start with Word to Markdown first, and then do a second pass of Markdown to InCopy. But the main goal here for me is not to clean up the Word cruft, but to to purge all of it. 

There are scripts to apply styling to local formatting, which can be challenging to use in complex documents with vestigal Word styles and a bunch of overlapping local overrides. But in a fresh import of something that was a Markdown file in a past life? It's easy and usually hassle-free.