Indesign as a word processor

[DavidSweeneyBear]

Hi all, just a general question as I'm new to Indesign.

Is it feasible, or "the done thing" to use Indesign directly as a word processor, for example if one is writing a book?

I'm compiling a collection of classic stories and started out working in OpenOffice. This invloved pasting in the source material from online sources (mostly project gutenburg) and often I find the formatting is very bad. the biggest issue being lines of text that are in fact individual paragraphs. This led me to the repetitive task of pressing "end" "delete" "space" on every line to bring the text into properly formed. paragraphs.

I then hit upon the idea of using my editing controller (which i use primarily for audio editing) to assign this group of keys to a single button - but found that OpenOffice is not able to recognize the controller.

Which is what led me to Indesign!

Judging by the amount of posts here about "how to import from Word" etc. I'm guessing what most folks do is to write in another software and then import to Indesign for final formatting.

In my case, for the afore-mentioned reason, I want to be doing everything in Indesign from the get-go.

I also like the idea of working on the finished piece from the ground up in one program - it just seems more efficient.

Any thoughts or advice? 

[BobLevine]

InDesign is a page layout application...not a word processor.

That said, if you don't want to use Word (which is the only word processor with a direct import) then don't. Nobody here can tell what features you'll miss in Word and the example you gave is not going to help anyone make a decision.

Pasting from a web page is going to be very hit or miss no matter what application you're using.

I know that's not exactly what you're looking for, but it is as honest as I can get.

[BobLevine]

And by the way...there's not a word processor in existence that wouldn't allow you to kill those paragraph returns a lot more efficiently.

[Colin Flashman]

For most projects I see, the content was written by the author in software that they were familiar with (usually Microsoft Word) and then it is imported into InDesign by me for formatting. In my environment, the authors that I liaise with are educators, not printers or graphic designers, and InDesign can have a steep learning curve.

InDesign's import for Microsoft Word could do with an upgrade to handle graphics drawn directly in word such as wordart, floating graphics, equations etc. My preferred method is to import a word file rather than cut and paste from the word file, but I'm sure my peers here will have their own opinions. To make sure that items haven't "dropped off" the word file, I usually ask the client to submit a PDF of the same file so I can check.

Anne-Marie Concepcion has a good video on Linked-in Learning about preparing a Word file for easier import into InDesign. Biggest issue I've found is "round-tripping" where the proof goes back to the client for proofreading and edits - they either make life easy and check PDFs and annotate it using the commenting tools; or they make life suck by completely resupplying the file and asking you to make changes on top of that from a hard copy that they printed out on an earlier version.

In terms of removing space then return, some text editors (not word processors) have the ability to use "regular expressions" or InDesign's equivalent of GREP. For example, Textwrangler could solve this task by doing a find/change and looking for \p{Zs}\r and replacing with \r

(\p{Zs} is any space that isn't a tab or linebreak).

[DavidSweeneyBear]

Here's an intersting article, someone who's into using Indesign from the ground up... https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2011/08/authors-why-you-should-be-writing-in-adobe-indesign/

[David Popham]

You might also consider using InCopy. If you have a full Creative Cloud subscription, you have access to InCopy. Although it often doesn't get much love, it plays well with InDesign workflows but keeps the focus for authors on the text. It also has many of InDesign's tools, including GREP, which Colin mentioned, for cleaning up text. You can even link InCopy stories to InDesign files so that authors can make edits to content, which will update in the InDesign file. That sort of workflow can work well in remote situations when the InCopy and InDesign files are kept on a cloud server like Dropbox, etc.