Working with placed text

[Shirley27543288jmaw]

Hi, I've placed text from Word but I'm struggling to edit it. All the text I've placed is hightlight in pink for some reason...? I'm simply trying to make a heading bold but it won't allow me to do all of them. The heading I'm working on just stays the same.  It's very strange.

[John Mensinger]

The pink shading indicates a font substitution. 

InDesign will only apply Bold styling if there is a Bold version of the font installed. (IOW, it won't apply false-bold to any font the way Word does.)

[Shirley27543288jmaw]

Oh, OK. Sorry, I'm a newbie at this, trying to publish my first book! It's strange that it's added bold to one of the other headings in that case...I'm using Lucida Sans. Is there a workaround please? Or just making fint size bigger? 

[Shirley27543288jmaw]

Ah, you were right, of course, it had changed the font for that heading, that's why I was able to use bold. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Getting material from Word to ID can be very straightforward, or a complete mess. Here's some basics:

You have to use styles in Word, and be consistent with them. Using only a few styles and then doing spot formatting and changes will create a complete mess in InDesign.

Use a font shared by both programs, one that has real (separate) faces for regular, italic, bold and bold-italic. Many fonts don't have real bold or italic and Word fakes it... which does not work in ID.

ID is completely styles-driven, so if you can map your Word styles to ID styles on import (Placement), it can make things simpler. There's a checkbox on the Place dialog "Show Import Options." If you check that, you'll get a whole menu that lets you manage the import and style mapping.

You have to get rid of all spot formatting, such as manually bolding headings, or applying a different font/size to a subheading. Use styles.

Word formatting is lousy, especially its feature (great for "word processing," not so great for formal layout) of spot bold and italic. It's best to create Word character styles for those and apply them, not use the built-in features, which are technically sloppy.

And do all cleanup of the Word file before you import it. Remove all double spaces, multiple paragraph spaces, and combinations like tab-space. That will make clean formatting in ID much easier.

[Shirley27543288jmaw]

🙏 Thanks for that! Much appreciated.

[Laubender]

Hi @Shirley27543288jmaw ,

also consider copy/paste with a script written by Marc Autret for this task.

More on that by Marc:

RichPaste | Copy and Paste with Minimal Formatting [UPDATE]
Marc Autret, April 06, 2016

"When it comes to pasting text from another document or application, InDesign provides two options, either keeping the original text attributes, fonts, styles (the full 'Paste' feature), or removing all attributes ('Paste without formatting'.) We also have tools and preferences in the field of style mapping, but on many occasions these features do not fit the need of dealing quickly with basic formatting problems. Here RichPaste comes to the rescue…"

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2015/10/richpaste-copy-and-paste-with-minimal-formatting

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )