Importing a Word document with least amount of formatting hassles

[Andrew Mikelsons]

What is the cleanest, hassle free way, to import a Word docment into Adobe (yes I realize Adobe uses the word "place" instead of import)? What if the Word document has formatting done to it like italics, headings, bolds, bullets, and headings? How can one avoid issues with importing Word formatting stuff when a Word document is imported ("placed") into InDesign?

How can one "place" the Word document into InDesign and avoid stuff like overrides? What does "override" even mean?

Thanks

[Willi Adelberger]

1. Every formatting must be done in Word with Paragraph and Character styles.
2. Multiple returns are not allowed to force space between lines.
3. No manual formatting without styles (that is overriding).
4. No hyphenation in Word, neither with automatic, nor with the hyphen and never with dashes.
5. Import in InDesign with options, and target the Word Styles to InDesign styles.
6. Don't bother about the appearance in Word, the structure is important, the function of a style.
7. Work in text in Word with norma text, don't CAPITALIZE, that must be done later with styles in InDesign.
8. Don't use page and column break in Word, use styles to do that.
9. Avoid forced line breaks as much as you can.
10. Avoid multiple spaces in a raw, use tabulators instead, in InDesign you can use spaces with a fixed width, which are not avalable in Word.
11. Avoid using Word images in InDesign (EMF, WMF, PNG), replace them with quality graphic formats.

Even if you work clean, at the end you have to remove overrides.

[Andrew Mikelsons]

What if you receive a Word file that has included all of the above? The document didn't use Word Paragraph or Character Styles; multiple returns were used; manual formatting was done; hyphenation and dashes were used; capitalization was used; page breaks were used.

Most client files come with all of the above done (and then some). 

How do you handle importing such a file into InDesign?

Thanks, Andy 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Fix it. And it's much better — in my experience and judgment — to fix the Word file before import rather than drag a mess into InDesign and fix it there. (Some disagree, but it's a matter of familiarity with the "fixup" tools in each app; I work all day in both, and find Word a little easier for these low-level, 'technical' tasks.)

Willi's list is a start. Get rid of all double everythings (spaces, tabs, returns). Get rid of soft returns. Make sure a paragraph style is assigned to every paragraph, without spot or local override formatting. And since very few users even know character styles exist, create those basic ones and swap out bold, italic and any special highlights the document might use.

Yes, it's a lot of work. The real solution is to push it back on the client or author, but... well... good luck with that.

Macros help a lot, one of the advantages of Word over ID. And turning on all hidden characters lets you see exactly what's going on.

[Joel Cherney]

You don't even really need to know any VBA to record and use macros in Word (although it does help a lot). 

There are plenty of other ways to go about this; the one suggested by Willi and James is pretty standard, and I endorse it without any notes. But there are other methods, which may warrant your investigation. (For example, I refer you to my nuke-it-from-orbit method I already posted.)

Back in Ye Olden Days, when I received many Word files from translators for flowing into InDesign templates (thankfully those days are long past for me) I used my own VBA to remove spacing & soft returns & other such typographical nonsense, and Jongware's PrepText.jsx script to automagically assign character styles to all local formatting. Saved a lot of time! And in response to what James says above re: pre-processing versus post-processing, given the choice between doing a boring repetitive task with the InDesign toolset vs. the Word toolset, I know where I'd personally rather spend my time. But this is really a point of personal preference. 

Lastly, people that I've referred to Anne-Marie's LinkedIn training on this topic say it's both exhaustive and useful. It covers a lot more than we have discussed in this thread; totally worth looking over. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Just a "yup," here — import from Word is a whole skill set/industry in itself, especially when countering problems with delicate bits like foot- and end notes. These basics will usually give you a clean enough file that it imports and gives you a good starting point within ID, but frequent users can ratchet the process up to all but 'perfecting' Word content for import that either lands all but fully formatted, or is completely ready for page by page styling and adjustment.

But just scraping out all the 'doubles' goes a long, long way. 🙂

[Andrew Mikelsons]

Thanks Joel. I bought it and hopefully can start making some headway. 

[Andrew Mikelsons]

What is the recommended way that InDesign promotes to create a book with InDesign? Is one supposed to write the book in InDesign? Or is one supposed to become an expert in Word to format it just right to import into InDesign? 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

You can always do something "right" or "somewhat right". 

When people were switching from Quark - a lot of them were still doing tables as bunch of separate TFs with lines... 

So it's not the case of preparing text "correctly for InDesign" - but just "correctly".

You can style text in WORD with local formatting - and it will look OK - but it won't be prepared correctly - Styles should be used - for more than a few lines of text. 

So if you are receiving text from a "bad" source - you will have to fix it - and you can either do it BEFORE in WORD - or AFTER - in the InDesign.

There are tools to help for both ways. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You can write in InDesign. I've done it both ways, more or less reserving Word for long, long-developing books over shorter, more visual ones. I find Word to be a better writing tool (once stripped and hot-rodded and a few key macros added) but ID works.

The key is that if you're going to write something in Word, you have to choose whether you're going to finish it there or whether it's a [modern version of a] 'manuscript' to be imported into ID for publication layout. If you're going to do it to the end in Word, you can use more elaborate styles and fuss over the layout and typography. If it's a 'manuscript,' it's best to keep it much simpler, with styles minimized to functional purposes rather than appearance. The biggest mistake is trying to make a very complex layout in Word and expecting it to import as-is (or even functionally) into ID.

But the meta level above that is that the Word file has to be kept clean and organized in a way that most Word users... can't comprehend. Some vast majority of Word users just hack and slash and fingerpaint and have no idea how to keep a document technically 'clean.' And while you can get away with that when the end goal is just to hit Print, you can't if it's to be imported into ID or, in spades, exported to any digital format.

So if you're going to write a book and take as long as most people do for such things and will probably edit and revise and restructure the whole way through, start off with as few organized styles as you can manage, and "purge" the doc by using Save-As at least once a day (which also can give you running backups), and by doing a save-to-RTF, open-as-DOCX cycle every so often. And use modern principles of doc construction, which means no double anythings and soft returns only in the tiny handful of cases where there's no other solution. And using defined character styles, not inherent overrides.

The TL;DR there is "ID is great with Word files as input... but only if those files are up to spec."

[Andrew Mikelsons]

Thank you for your excellent summary. So what you're saying is use Word as if you were creating a text file; and use the Styles Pane for any formatting. The simpler the formatting in the Word file the better the Place into ID. Thanks. 

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

...So what you're saying is use Word as if you were creating a text file; and use the Styles Pane for any formatting. The simpler the formatting in the Word file the better the Place into ID. Thanks. 

By @Andrew Mikelsons

Exactly.

And there's an added benefit: when styles are used to format any kind of document — Word, InDesign, etc. — it makes the content able to convert to many other file formats, such as HTML, XML, EPUB, accessible PDF, and more.

That's the future of publishing. Create the content, format it with Styles, and use the content for any kind of media.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Besides all the best-practices Willi provide, you will want to enable the "Show Import Options" menu when you place a Word file. It's a checkbox at the bottom of the file list when you select the file to import/place. In there, you can carefully map all the incoming styles so that less cleanup is needed once in ID, and do other things.

But it really comes down to having as clean a Word file as you can get before you import it. Very much a GIGO operation, and Word tends to load up files with Garbage. About the only point Willi doesn't cover in depth is that it's a good idea to get rid of all spot/override formatting like Bold and Italic and replace them with defined character styles, the way InDesign does it. (Create the character styles in Word, then use Search and Replace to replace the spot format with the defined one.)

It's also a good idea to clean out the garbage before you import. As a last step, use Save As to write the Word file under a new name, and this will purge a ton of dead material (mostly undo info) and make the file smaller and cleaner. Some prefer to save to .doc format for import, over .docx; others like to save to .rtf instead. I've had good luck with all three as long as the Word doc isn't too complex and is "clean" according to all these rules.

The complete opposite of this is to get a file from some unskilled user and try to import it without taking any preparatory steps. The result is almost always a steaming pile of GIGO. 🙂

[Joel Cherney]

In case you're still not exactly clear on exactly what an override is, I made this little animation to show the precise difference between locally applied formatting overrides versus paragraph and character styles, and how to use the Style Override Highlighter to show where you have overrides. 

When I have a Word document that is full of local formatting, I like to clean it up. Sometimes that involves running a VBA in Word that looks for places where someone just clicked the little italic "i" button when they wanted an italic word, and replaces those with Word character styles with names like "ItalicOnly" and "BoldOnly." Sometimes I prefer a more nuke-it-from-orbit-it's-the-only-way-to-be-sure approach, and use pandoc to convert to Markdown, which leaves only raw text with some simple markup for bold and italic, which I can then convert to InCopy, which I can bring straight into the document with no overrides or Word cruft.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Sometimes I prefer a more nuke-it-from-orbit-it's-the-only-way-to-be-sure approach

Naw, that's only needed when the source is Google Docs. 😄

Seriously, though — Further advice to the OP: you always want an import doc to be "genuine Word" in format. The export or cross-saves from clones like Docs, Pages, OpenOffice etc. are often incompatible with ID import. If you get a doc from a Docs user, open and resave it in a real copy of Word (still doing all the above cleanup, too) and you'll avoid a lot of headaches.

[Joel Cherney]

Naw, that's only needed when the source is Google Docs. 😄

Someday, James, you and I will be in the same city at the same time, and I will offer to buy you the beverage of your choice in the venue of your choice. If you take me up on it, I'll bring a laptop, and I'll show you what I get from some state-or-county-level Bureaucracies That Shall Go Unnamed, and you will eat these words. 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

https://www.adobescripts.com/uploads/WordStyle.zip

This will convert - in WORD - all combinations of Sub-/Super- Script, Bold, Italic, Underline, AllCaps as local formatting - into CharStyles.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

And after you clean up your WORD document - save as RTF and then import - instead of doc(x/m). 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Everyone has their preference and this is a workaround if a doc/x import chokes, but I honestly can't remember the last time I had a problem with any of the three that was traceable to the format. I really think a lot more has to do with files from clone apps, and ones that haven't been Save/As'ed for a long time.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

I think the main problem is with Footnotes?

DOC(X/M) can be sometimes problematic - RTF from the same file is OK.