Issue with Imported Word Text Retaining Original Fonts in InDesign

[tomh4708834]

Hi, this is totally new problem, that I haven´t face before.

I have created Paragraph styles as usual, and Imported the file by using "Customise style import".

I want to use Minion Pro, and that is the base for all paragraph styles. But InDesign changes style always to Word document´s font, Times New roman, 12pt. If I change the Word file´s font size, it also brings the changed font size.

And I have tried everything I found from here: I don´t have any Character styles created and I don´t have any Paragraph style activated before importing.

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[Laubender]

Hi @tomh4708834 ,

so you do have text with the applied paragraph styles from InDesign that are showing style overrides?

Well, you could select all the text in the story and remove all style overrides in one go with a menu command from your Paragraph Styles panel.

For the "why" I have no answer.

One needs the Word file and your InDesign document to test anything…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

To add to Laubender's post, how did you format the Word document (in Word)? You need to use only Word's paragraph and character styles, not the formatting tab on the ribbon. Also, make sure you are not importing unused [Word] styles. 

If you are using Windows Word, you can select all the text and and type Control-spacebar to remove all but the paragraph styles. Unfortunately, it removes character style formatting in addition to any manual formatting.

I believe the Mac equivalent is with Control-spacebar (not Command) or Control-FN-Spacebar.

[tomh4708834]

Thank you for your kind  help.

The problem must be in original Word documents. But the problem is, that my customer has made 400 pages book  in separate documents, and there are at least 40 documents, and every document has different settings. This is a kind of Genealogy, so every other word is Italic and Bold. I can´t lose them.

So I don´t know what to do. (My client is 80 yers old man, and I don´t want to bother him repairing these files. (Which would be the best thing to do).

Is there a way to copy-paste text, change the copied text to my created paragraph style and still keep all character styles?

[Laubender]

@tomh4708834 said: "… Is there a way to copy-paste text, change the copied text to my created paragraph style and still keep all character styles?"

Hi Tom,

you could test the script Rich Paste by Marc Autret that should do what you want.

It works with copy the text from Word, paste with the help of the script so that the target paragraph style in the target text frame is the default formatting for the text and Italic and Bold are converted to Italic and Bold from the font of the applied paragraph style. Read about the script and download it from:

RichPaste | Copy and Paste with Minimal Formatting [UPDATE]
Marc Autret, April 06, 2016
https://indiscripts.com/post/2015/10/richpaste-copy-and-paste-with-minimal-formatting

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

As long as the customer was consistant in their formatting, it shouldn't be too hard to clean up.

Open up the Style Panel:

Select the manual formatting (styles in square braces) and apply correct style. Don't worry about what the style looks like:

Create any Character styles as needed:

Find/Replace manual formatting with character styles:

Import into InDesign, matching up Word styles to yours. Save the preset in case you need to do it again.

After you import, select all the text and remove any paragraph overrides using the button shown with the arrow below. If you still see any disk icons, delete them and replace with appropriate styles.