Missing accented letters when using linked text from Word and paragraph styles (italian text)

[Giulia26129509kzl1]

Hi, I have a problem with my indesign project. I'm trying to link the text of a word file inside my indesign project, I imported the file and connected all the paragraph styles to the formatting text (headline and body) that I previously set on word. Everything is okay until all accented letters don't appear in the paragraph style font and a missing font error appears ("Arial unicode ms bold" which I never used, nor in Id nor in Word) . The problem is that, if I delete and insert manually the accented letters, Indesign insert the right font but, as I edit the text in Indesign, automatically the link with the source file is lost. Any idea on how I can solve this problem? I need to have all accented letters in the paragraph style font and to be able to edit my text in the word file (source file) so that the text replaces automatically whenever I edit it in word. 

Thank you for your help!

[Joel Cherney]

Well, my ideas all involve making changes upstream, in MS Word. One of the many reasons I oersonally don't trust Word is that it will happily substitute fonts without informing you. So if you select a font that doesn't have e-with-acute or e-with-grave, and then you type that accented character on your keyboard, Word will put in an accented character (or sometimes just a combining accent) from a default font with broad coverage, like Arial Unicode MS. I'd go highlight one of those dropped e-with-acutes in Word and hit Control-D to see if it was really set in the font that I thought it was. 

Generally, all of your possible fixes involve going into your Word doc, making some changes (I'd start with "pick a different font, one known to have these characters"), resaving, and then updating the link in InDesign, and seeing if those changes resolved the issue. If that doesn't work for you immediately, I'd suggest sharing a sample Word file here, as you shared some screenshots in your initial post, so that we can try to figure out exactly what is wrong with your Word input file that is causing character drops in these extremely well supported, commonly found accented characters.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

This comes up from time to time:

Go to Preferences, Type, and un-check "Enable Missing Glyph Protection" to fix this; then try again.

[Joel Cherney]

That's a very good point, Brad. I personally always turn that setting off, but it's possible to have it turned on, and to have clicked the "Don't show this again" checkbox in the dialog that warns you that Missing Glyph Protection is on. If you've done that, InDesign helpfully simulates the awful habit of Word silent auto-substitution of fonts for non-ASCII glyphs. 

[BobLevine]

Just for clarity, that's under Advanced Type in preferences.