Indesign not finding tab characters imported from Word???

[lisastarr8]

I have a new problem that may be related to an Indesign (or OS) update that I cannot figure out for the life of me. I have bulleted text from Word that I need to reformat with an Indesign style. This results in two sets of bullets followed by a tab; usually I used  Find/Replace to remove the extra bullet and tab, easy peasy. Indesign is now not finding any of these bullets or tabs (GREP, selection story or document) in any text from Word (imported or pasted), in any of my InDesign dox. It finds tabs inserted in Indesign just fine, but not from Word. I can see the tab character clearly but Indesign cannot. This is maddening because there are thousands of these things that I now need to manually delete. InDesign app is v18.1, up to date (creative cloud), as is my mac OS. Already tried (doesn't work) saving my Indesign files as idml, importing text vs. pasting, restarting, running disc utility. Tearing my hair out here. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I can't quite tell what's going on from the screen shot, but Word and ID handle bullet lists a little differently. ID will not create a specific tab character for the first line (although you can add one if you need it for style adjustment.)

Searching for bullet/space should work just as well, here. But the missing tab is 'as it should be,' not a glitch.

[lisastarr8]

Hi James, Thank you so much for replying. It makes sense that ID and Word handle bulleted lists differently, for sure. I've encountered this before, but have always been able to do a find (^8^t) and replace with no character to fix. My ID no longer finds ^8 or ^t in placed or pasted word text, even though it does identifty the invisible character (>>); that's what the screenshot shows. Any other ideas?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Barb's answer has more of the technical aspects, which you might find useful.

If the process worked before and now doesn't, it could be a change in either Word or ID. The first thing to do is try a few other documents from Word to see if the change is consistent. Trying older docs you know to have worked properly is another good check.

But in the end, if one or the other changed some subtle aspect of file structure or import, an update to your method is probably the only good solution. ID does have sophisticated wildcard and GREP search options.

(Bullets are always a little weird, at least for me. I just import and do whatever it takes. But if I had a regular workflow of needing to import bullets and quickly get them tidied up in ID, I'd look more closely at the nuts and bolts.)

[lisastarr8]

Aw nuts, you are probably right. I do the auto-updates with both Word and Creative cloud so there have been many. I do use the ID wildcard and GREP search options all the time—they are wonderful—but this one does not seem to be working any more.

[Barb Binder]

Hi @lisastarr8:

When you use File > Place a bullet list from Word, the List Paragraph+ style appears in the Paragraph Styles panel. Just redefine the style and all will be done. 

If you assign bullets manually, then you get into your dilemma. You can:

• Create a bullet style
• Find all bullet tab, replace with style
• Find all bullet tab, remove

~Barb

[lisastarr8]

Hi Barb, thank you so much for replying! Your workaround is really tricky, I love it. Unfortunately, the source files have no specific style applied for bulleted lists; bullets have been added manually using the bullet option in Word's Home tab. So it's imported into ID with a general paragraph style. I can't change that style in ID without changing all of the other imported general paragraphs. Your tricky solution works if I apply a list style to the manually bulleted lists in the source Word dox, and then re-import them into ID, but there are dozens of files with thousands of lists so I hope to find a more automated solution 😞

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Ah, the joys of Word spot formatting. (I'm writing a lengthy guide to Word use right now and have a few words I won't say about the practice.)

It *seems* as if a macro could be used to find and style all bulleted items. That assumes there's some consistency; it assumes all bullets would use the same style. But anything has to be better than manually fixing them all.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

@lisastarr8, Word actually does apply a Word paragraph formatting style to lists whenever the ribbon bar icons are used; it's a generic multi-use style called List Paragraph and it's used regardless of the list's formatting, such as bullets, numbers, letters.

In Word, lists automatically use List Paragraph style.

You can take advantage of that feature by controlling the import options into InDesign, specifically Map Styles utility which lets you assign the incoming Word Styles to styles in your InDesign layout.

InDesign's Import Options: Style MappingThe result in InDesign.

The drawback to this method is that because Word uses one style to format both bulleted and number lists, you can't differentiate them in InDesign; they're all going to look the same in the layout.

The best solution:

Make better Word documents. Use Word's pre-defined styles for different types of lists: Bulleted or Numbered.

Lists that are correctly formatted in Word.

This lets you control the Style Mapping into InDesign. Map Word bullets to your InDesign bullet style, and map Word numbers to your InDesign number style.

Map bullet and numbered styles.

The problem you're having now never happens in your InDesign layout.

Bam! Everything is formatted correctly.

Hope this helps!

[lisastarr8]

Bevi you are a god (or goddess) of ID. I never saw the customized style mapping thing before, and it's HUGE. Thank you soooo much! 

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

You're welcome, @lisastarr8. 

I teach "101 ways to get content into InDesign" in my accessibility classes, and this is one technique every InDesigner should use for every Word document they're placing into their layout...whether or not they're concerned about accessibility in the final PDF.

Word puts a helluva lotta code crud into their files, and if you don't control it (aka, strip it out!) when you import Word.docx into your layout, you'll end up with nightmares like yours, problems when trying to make interactive and accessible PDFs and EPUBs, and troubles with formatting for any kind of project. You end up "fighting" the Word crud all day long while trying to produce the design.

Good designers don't let code crud creep into their layouts!

FYI, on your original attempt of Find/Replace the extra Word bullet character and tab, Word often uses some odd-ball non-standard non-unicode bullet characters. Depends upon the operating system the author was on, if it was updated recently, what fonts they have on their computer system, and what their version of Word's List Paragraph style is set to.

They could all look the same to your eye, but you'd have to do forensics on the author's Word file to figure out what was actually used. Gah!

Or, knowing that you don't really know what the character is, you can copy the offending characters and paste them into InDesign's Find/Search field. This method works about 3/4 of the time.

Good luck. And sleep well knowing that you're now controlling code crud. <grin>

[lisastarr8]

Thank you SO much, I really appreciate your time and help!

[Barb Binder]

Hi @lisastarr8:

If there is a reliable pattern, we can automate the formatting. Can you just share a few list items as they intially they appear in InDesign? Put it on a file sharing server (creative cloud, dropbox, google), click my avatar and message me the list. You do not need to include anything proprietary, just the initial formatting with some words next to it.

~ Barb

[lisastarr8]

Barb, thank you so much for the offer. I tried to make a file for you, but doing so realized that the problem wasn't reproducible in a new file. Spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out, but so far the only thing I can say is it's connected to a couple of ID files and not others. I removed all the content from the ID files and imported Word text - no problem. Maybe gremlins (?) that are not fixed by saving as idml? In any case, my other ID files seem to be ok. Thank you!