Retain italics & bold using paragraph styles when bringing in Word text to Indesign

[elliotlipsh]

need some help here... had same problem in the past and the only easy way was to change the font in Word before I bring it over to InDesign. The problem with doing this is that I am restricted. Some fonts in Word will change the italic and bold if I change overall..... ughhh.

there must be an easy way...

help thanks

[elliotlipsh]

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/isklyd6afpyolzr/AABTQ6c8G-Q-3YSN-5CAi8sra?dl=0

[hammer0909]

I created a quick silent video showing the process that pretty much summarizes all of the posts in this thread. When I went through it, everything worked as expected and I used all of the styles that were in your file. Adobe Creative Cloud. It may not play in your browser but you can download by clicking on the button in the upper right corner.

[Joseph28415426sq5e]

Just wanted to point out that if you have a charachter style or paragraph style selected when you import, it can change everything. Import word doc ctrl+D, click  show import options, remove styles and formatting from text and tables, check preserve local overrides, create charachter styles for italics, bolds, find and replace basic character format font style with the style you created. Once you have replaced basic character formating with actual character styles, now you can select all and change to any paragraph style you want.

Do not import word with a character style selected, make sure it says no character style otherwise everything will turn italic/bold.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This is a good and often overlooked point. It's all too easy to place a Word file into an empty paragraph that has some bonkers combination of paragraph and character style applied, and those characteristics will be "absorbed" by all the text imported. I finally learned to check that empty, placeholder paragraph to be completely neutral (usually Body or equivalent, and no character styles applied) to save a lot of aggravation. 🙂