Immediate loss of all character styles (italics, bold, etc.) when placing text from Word

[Montaillou]

I use InDesign CS6, and have recently had a problem when typesetting chapters in a book that I've never encountered before.

Basically, when placing chapters into InDesign, some of them immediately lose all character formatting (italics, bold). It only happens for some chapters, but not others (each one is supplied by a different author), and it makes no difference if I initially save the Word chapters in .rtf form (a suggestion I saw online somewhere).

Also, I'd perhaps understand this behaviour if it was a problem in one of my paragraph styles, so that applying it stripped out character styles in the original. But the loss of formatting happens IMMEDIATELY - i.e. before I've applied any of the styles I've set up in InDesign to any of the text.

I'd be really grateful if anyone could solve this mystery, as it will save me many hours of manually restoring formatting paragraph-by-paragraph... !

Many thanks in advance.

[JonathanArias]

are you doing mapping? preserving styles if not mapping to a style?

can you show us the mapping styles dialog window so we can see what you have going?

[Montaillou]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Here's the dialogue box for one of the problem chapters:

There don't seem to be enough Word Styles to cover the variation - the bold, italics etc. are just applied piecemeal, rather than as proper paragraph or character styles. "Preserve styles if not mapping to a style" sounds like what I'm after - but where do I find that?

Thanks again...

[TᴀW · Accepted solution]

Try saving the Word document (presuming it's a Word document you're placing?) as a .doc file rather than .docx, and place that. Do the character styles come through that way?

[Montaillou]

This did work - thanks so much!

I'm just curious as to why it worked? I maybe should have mentioned I'm using Word 2010 (there are various tweaks they did later which I hate). Anyway, problem solved - thanks again.

[TᴀW]

In my experience, InDesign's .doc import is often more reliable than .docx. Others might disagree, but it's part of my standard workflow to only place .doc files, never .docx.

[BobLevine]

If there are images involved, DOCX is far superior.

[TᴀW]

How so?

[Mateusz Czekała]

I've got the same experience. Placing .docx instead of .doc usually results in missing italics and additional bolds in the text.

[Laubender]

Hi Montaillou,

Ariel had the correct answer for you. Very good!

FWIW: In case you also run into bugs of InDesign's doc import filter there is also a way using a script by Marc Autret that could help, RichPaste 1.7 :

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

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

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[wmrowen]

Thanks Uwe for the reference to RichPaste! I have one of those frightening Word documents that is now less scary.