Placing MS Word text gives wrong text color

[David Wendelken]

My draft document is in MS Word.   I'm mimicking the feel of a medieval manuscript so the lowercase letters are colored black and the uppercase letters are colored a dark red.   In MS Word, this is letter-perfect.  I have MS Word macros that set the color of the letters.

When I use the Place command to put this MS Word document text into a Text frame, I get very surprising results.   Some times it does the right thing.  Other times, an entire paragraph will be transformed to Red or to Black.   It seems quite random!

What can I do to get it to not do this?

[Mike Witherell]

If you are using paragraph and character styles in Word, then when you File > Place into InDesign, and also tick ON Show Import Options, you will come to a secondary dialog box where you can map Word styles to InDesign styles.

[David Wendelken]

Thanks.  It didn't solve the problem, but it will still be helpful.

I'm adjusting the styles and style usage in MS Word and will try re-importing soon.   I had some styles in MS Word that were both character and paragraph, but should have been just character.   I'm hoping this will help.

I did notice that it seemed to often get confused when it encountered a character with an accent mark above it.   I know all the fonts involved can handle those characters properly, so that's not it.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I assume this is all being done with spot formatting in Word? ID usually imports local formatting correctly but it may be... overwhelmed by so many instances of such a tricky format scheme.

If you're using styles in Word, with a paragraph style for the body and a character style for the UC letters (which I assume are all at the beginning of sentences or at least lines), it should be trivial to touch up the styles in ID even if their characteristics don't import perfectly in the first pass.

It sounds also as if a GREP style would work well here; simply format your base text as you want it, then apply a GREP style only to the uppercase glyphs, further restricting that to first-letter-of-sentence etc. if needed.

There's probably not much to gain in laboring to get InDesign to do a perfect first-time import once you have the styles mapped. As long as you're consistent in both apps, you should be able to import new or updated documents with only a little one-time touchup after import.

[David Wendelken]

I was using paragraph styles, with character styles and also occasional overrides.

Sadly, some of the character styles were defined as paragraph-character, not character only, and I *think* that was part of the confusion.  So I've just fixed that in word and I'm setting up matching named styles in InDesign.

The other problem is it (I thought) randomly decides to turn body text into footnote text.  Then I realized that letters with an accent above them seemed to trigger this problem.  Not sure what's going on there!   Although there are footnotes in the document, there aren't any anywhere near the occurrences of this problem.

I'll find out sometime tonight or tomorrow whether the style fixes I've done in word and the style setups in InDesign solve that problem or not.  A friend said I may need to remove the footnotes from the Word Document and apply them manually in InDesign. 😞

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Sounds a bit like document corruption. Export the Word doc to RTF and either place that, or open it and resave as DOC or DOCX under a new name, and import that. That often purges excess data and can correct things like footnote linkages.

[David Wendelken]

James,  THANK YOU!   Exporting the document to RTF and then importing it made a huge difference!

Sadly, the RTF seems to lose the styles that were assigned to the text, so while the document looks good, it won't be as easily modified if I want to change something about the style.  Same if I convert it back to a Word docx.

I don't think it's "document corruption".  I think it is just bad programming in the word document conversion.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

ID is capable of importing even complex Word documents with great fidelity.... but there are so many factors (== hurdles) that it's not a common outcome even in very controlled workflows. Never forget that these are two completely different apps, by different makers, with very different user bases, and for all the similarities, used in very different ways. There is no reason, that is, that one should flawlessly open the other's doc files except a best-effort import option in InDesign.

Both doc types are subject to all kinds of data issues (bloat from undo info and metadata) and cumulative corruption from repeated editing and saving. There are ways to manage a workflow so that something developed in Word will import as smoothly as possible, and ways to "de-corrupt" both doc types, but the reality is that any particularly large, complex or long-developed Word doc is going to import imperfectly and need cleanup once imported.

Could the process be better? Sure. There's a tool that bridges Word and InDesign almost seamlessly, but it's not cheap, because it addresses what is effectively a whole industry of its own. Is this the "fault" of ID's import? Maybe, in that Adobe hasn't invested equivalent R&D&$ in perfecting/managing/supporting the feature.

It's generally accepted that going from Word to InDesign means some degree of fixing and reworking the doc, with essentially no return path to Word. If you do it a lot, you learn both the methods that lead to the smoothest transition (such as making sure the Word file is not corrupt or bloated), and the processes of mapping the Word document type to ID's.