WORD doc with lots of photos to InDesign

[defaultegk4aim7tbv0]

I have a WORD  file with lots of photos, 200 plus photos, 300 plus pages.  Photos were inserted. End product Book for Print.

My file is not formatted yet, everything, text and photos are only in order. Photos are not sized.  Some text needs to go into text boxes, also not done.

I believe that I need to save the Word Doc as a PDF then PDF2DTP... in order for all the photos to transfer properly ( correct?)

My question is whether it would be better to format the text and size the photos in WORD before transfering it to INdesign or rather do all the formatting in INdesign.  Any advice would be much appreciated.

[J E L]

@defaultegk4aim7tbv0 There are several ways to do this and you'll no doubt get a variety of methods. I've had this exact situation many times and the process requires a lot of thought. Without seeing your document it's hard to give exact advice for your particular project. But here are some generalizations.

The problem with images inserted into Word is that they aren't always the right files you'll need for print. The author should provide a separate folder with all the images so they can be inspected for color space and ppi. If they have captions that is another consideration. You'll have to relink them but if the file names are the same then that's easy enough. On the other hand, if you remove the photos in Word before importing, you have the job of trying to figure out where the images need to be placed into the text if that is not intuitive. Also, is the trim size of your InDesign page the same as the Word document? If it's smaller, you may have a challenge trying to place the images in your document from the Word import as you go page by page with your cursor loaded. (And you might experience crashing with all that content loaded depending on the size of the images.) You are probably going to have to work with image placement on an individual basis anyway.

As for formatting the text, I like to do everything I can in Word to remove all the extra stuff then apply simple, basic styles for chapter titles, running text, and so on. I separately set up my InDesign styles so they are ready for mapping to. One problem with some Word documents are the invisible characters that come in, especially if authors cut-and-paste text from different sources. Extra paragraph returns and extra spaces between sentences all should be removed in Word before importing. Again, everyone has a different way of approaching a project like this so it's good to get a lot of input to figure out what you feel is going to be the best method for you. If you have more questions as you go, let us know.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

There's no point in doing any more finished layout formatting in Word... it's wasted time when InDesign can do it much better.

As for the photos, as mentioned, it's better to get the originals from your source. The mere placing of them in Word may have already compromised the resolution depending on their Word preferences, but at least they can be used as placeholders for the better versions you might get separately.

InDesign will place them at the full resolution that they currently are in the Word file, but they will be embedded instead of being linked as you would normally want. ID allows you to unembed the pictures from the Links panel, and this allows you to work on them outside of ID e.g. Photoshop. You can select and unembed them individually or select a bunch at a time in the Links list. Since you have so many, you might want to search out a script to do that en masse.

There is another way to get the photos from the Word document if it's a .docx, but I will shelve that for now.

[J E L]

So true that you don't want to do finished layout work in Word for a straight import but I'm not sure what happens with Word formatting using a third party software as @defaultegk4aim7tbv0 is suggesting where the content goes from Word to PDF through their spin and then back into InDesign. I've never worked with that method or conversion software so it could make sense to do some Word styling so the PDF looks the way you want your InDesign doc to look. Apparently that software retains all the fonts and design from the PDF.

[BobLevine]

You won't get anything different than what's already in the Word file. Don't believe me? Change the file extension from DOCX to ZIP, unzip it and check out the contents.

Just place the Word file in InDesign, select all of the images from the links panel and unembed them.

Then get to work.

[defaultegk4aim7tbv0]

Thank you so much! This makes sense to me...I'll give it a try.
Best wishes

[J E L]

Bob, have you used PDF2DTP for a doc with lots of images like this? Are you saying it doesn't matter what you do to the Word file in the beginning... you would still have to extract all the image files? Is their process basically the same as zip? Curious as I have never used it.

[BobLevine]

No. I'm saying there's no point in it. Place the Word doc and then unembed the images and you're good to go. The only thing that changes when you place images in Word is the file name.