Suggested Tools to Add to InDesign to Facilitate Book Development

Question

I would like to suggest, specifically within the paragraph style options, the addition of a confirmation checkbox for an option that automatically creates character styles. For example: when we import a fully formatted text with italics and bold, and we need to change the font, these character styles change automatically.

Mike Witherell · Accepted Answer

An untrained Word user will be applying bold and italic directly. Directly-applied bold and italic needs to be Find/Changed in InDesign so that it uses character styles. That is better management.

A better-trained Word user will apply these by means of a character style in Word. When File > Place-ing a better-made word docx, the bold and italics either map to your existing Character styles or else become new Character styles, once imported. Nothing in this process will remove character styles. The InDesign document definition of Bold and Italic win out over imported Word docx that also has character styles named bold and italic.

Still, I'm not sure if I am really understanding what you are asking.

Are you familiar with triggering Show Import Options when you File > Place a Word docx?

Mike Witherell · Answer

If you make a character style for bold that only has the bold attribute, and does not include the typeface name attribute, then when you change the typeface font in the paragraph style, the character style does not need to change. It already provides bold. (We will assume the changed typeface has a bold version in it).

With no documents open, build a set of bold, italic, bold italic, underscore, superscript, subscript, and nobreak character styles. That way they are available to all new documents (but not retroactively injected into old ones)

Another useful idea: build a style donor document. When you find that your existing document needs certain character styles, you can go through the paragraph/or/character styles panel menu button to Load Styles, pulling in what you need from the donor document.

If you spend some time in the Word docx before File > Place-ing it into InDesign, you can comb through the Word docx styles and make sure they are named the same as your style names in InDesign. Make sure bold and italic are character styles in Word before placing it. That way, when you File > Place and Show Import Options, you can match styles to styles and it flows in already tagged correctly. Of course, others may opt to Find/Change to accomplish the same cleanup.

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