Oddities with Word Import

[dickveitch]

I have Indesign CC and Microsoft Word 2016.

To prepare my Word document I separate the graphics and tables to new files leaving only the text.  I then Place that Word file in Indesign.  Looks good, mostly.

The last two letters of one word in the 4854 word document are now bold.  I went back and made the whole paragraph bold and then regular and resaved the Word file.  No change.

Two little two letter words are now italic.

Two places where I had a straight single quote it is now a curly single quote.

I have 107 documents to place into Indesign and these errors make me lose confidence in the process.  Can anybody suggest improvements?

[Ian Blogs]

Could you show us a screen shot of your import options.

[dickveitch]

Thanks for asking.  I have tried changes here but without result.  Now I see the tick on typographers quotes and that fixes the single quote error.  I still have two characters of a three letter word showing bold and two short words in italics.  My import options (with typographers quotes now unticked) are:

The word files I have to work with are from a hundred different authors in at least 15 countries.  Each file contains italics and bolds.  I am happy to change entire documents to not have any bold but do not want to do anything that might lose italics.

[Ian Blogs]

All I can suggest is you tick 'Customize Style Import' and check that the Word character styles are converting to the correct indesign character styles.

[dickveitch]

I thought of that.  I don't have any character styles set in my Indesign files but use paragraph styles extensively to get headings, subheadings, some selected paragraphs and the like to a standard format.  I also note that Word has only one type of style that can be applied to a paragraph or selection.

I don't want to do anything that takes away the italics within paragraphs of mostly regular text.

To date nothing has stopped the two bolded characters within one word in one paragraph from changing from regular text in Word to bold in Indesign.  Same for two italicized words which are regular in Word and magically change to italics in Indesign.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

dickveitch​, the best way to control the import and formatting of text in your situation would be to use character styles in the original Word files for bold and italic. And then choose the bottom-most option in InDesign's import dialogue to map the styles.

Usually these character styles are named Strong (for bold) and Emphasis (for italics) across all media. There are default character styles already in Word 2016 for them. You can do a search and replace in Word (More Options) to search for manual italics formatting and replace it with the Emphasis character style. Similar with word, but replace it with the Strong character style.

Import the Word file via style mapping. In InDesign's mapping dialogue, you can choose to bring in Word's character styles and they will appear in your styles panels (and you can adjust/edit them afterwards). Or you can map them to new InDesign character styles for Strong and Emphasis right there in the mapping dialogue.

Save these settings as a preset and they're all ready for your next Word file.

FYI, a lot of crazy crud can get stuck in Word files and end up in your InDesign layout to cause mind-numbing stuff like what you describe. My shop gets a lot of files like this. We always encourage our designers to clean up the Word file before bringing it into InDesign. Word can do a better job of cleaning up its crud while InDesign just brings it in, tries to ignore it, but often can't. And InDesign's find/replace can't spot the craziest of this crud so it often can't remove it, either.

With many files, it's often to late to clean it up once it's in InDesign.

[dickveitch]

Thanks for all this.  Far too complicated for me to consider at this stage of my document preparation.  I have more than 100 documents prepared on almost 100 computers.  Anyway, the problem is not with words or phrases that are italic in the Word document and intended to be italic in Indesign - they are transferring exactly right.  It is that two letters in one word have changed from regular text in Word to become bold in the Indesign document.  And that two little words that are regular in Word are now italic in Indesign.  However, a little further investigation of Word styles is warranted as it appears that Normal style in the current test document, created on a computer in the Seychelles, is well out of step with the Normal style on this machine.  Tidying that up appears to have stopped the bolding issue but the italics problem remains.

More tests to be done.  Thanks for suggesting new directions.