We’re about to place a Microsoft Word doc that has some things to say about Adobe InDesign. There will be six topics, most with a few subtopics, and some body copy. Some of the text will be italicized, some bold, and the word InDesign will need to be hot pink.
If it sounds like you may have recently built styles that could be used for such text, you’re right. How easy it will be to apply those styles depends on the condition of the document we’re given. We’ll look at two scenarios: one optimal (and exceedingly rare) and another that requires more work (which is more common). Either way, some preparation is required:
Note: When placing text, we should set our default paragraph style to the one that will be applied to the most text:
If the Microsoft Word document was made by someone who uses paragraph and character styles thoroughly, life can be good for the person doing the layout in InDesign. It can be very good, indeed, if the styles in Word are named identically to those in the destination InDesign document. I believe I said before that this combination is exceedingly rare, but it’s not impossible to arrange with bribes or threats or other forms of cajoling.
If one of the two text frames is selected, the Word content will flow into them both as soon as we use the Place command. I’d like you to see the slightly more general case when nothing at all is selected. While nothing is selected, be sure the style body copy is highlighted and set to be the default. Even if we strip an incoming file’s formatting, we’ll at least have that.
One small item that catches the eye is the small warning triangle that “warns” us that there are Style Name Conflicts. As if that was a bad thing! In this case, it’s telling us that five names match, but it doesn’t say how many styles there are. I recall that we made three paragraph and three character styles for a total of six. Now that is unfortunate. To resolve this issue (and just to see if there were any other styles that aren’t in “conflict”), we should access a list.
At the top, Word’s presumptuously named Normal seems to be used and has no match in our document.
At the bottom of the list is a character style without a match to ours. The Word user chose a more sober name for that style (for InDesign). We went with spicy.
Wasn’t that wonderful? It’s a shame, then, that almost no one gets to enjoy such a workflow.
Most Word-using content creators don’t use styles in that application; some don’t even know they can! Thus, the only style that’s “used” is Normal, with lots of overrides. If the writer wants a header, they just change the font, size, and weight. Later, if they want another header, they hope they do the same again consistently.
But should the writer be concerned about the look and feel of a document? Since most content is passed to InDesign, where styles are commonly used, the writer really only needs to indicate what text should be a header or subheader, etc. We, the InDesign users, can then apply well-chosen styles with consistency.
Thus, a much more common workflow includes Word docs that are probably badly formatted, but contain notations we can use to identify what formatting should be applied and where. Different writers (or workplaces) will use different notation. Some may not use it for everything.
For example, a system called Markdown (and its derivatives) uses different symbols either surrounding or prefixing text to indicate its later formatting. Thus, *italicize me* would indicate that the text should be italicize me. Bold would be indicated by two asterisks. A header would be prefixed with a “#”, a subhead with “##,” and so on.
The Word file in this exercise is less formally (and less completely) marked up, and thus offers more challenges. Each topic header is prefixed with the HTML tag “<h1>” and each subheader with a “<sub>” tag. Those should be easy to find and change.
The writer assumed that leaving some text italicized or bold would be more helpful than marking it. This may seem intuitive, but the reality is that it’s easier for us to receive either fully styled text (like in the ideal example above) or text we can completely strip of its formatting. This real world example uses text that is neither.
Since we chose body copy as our default paragraph style (highlighting it when nothing was selected), choosing only Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables would leave us with nothing but text in the body copy style with no overrides. Unless markup or other indications have been used to let us know where formatting should be applied, we’d be lost.
So we need to also Preserve Local Overrides to maintain character overrides like italics and bold. Unfortunately, other, sometimes bizarre, overrides come with Word docs, too. Thus, once we protect the overrides we want, we’ll have to clear the rest.
Hopefully, the text mostly looks like our definition of body copy. The GREP Style that we included in that paragraph style should have made the word “InDesign” pink. We should see the text in the font and at the size we chose. Also, we should see some bold and italicized text here and there. So far, it may seem that no other overrides slipped in from Word.
Yes, I know, our text definitely isn’t running right-to-left, but InDesign thinks it is, and that can cause us grief later. So as soon as the overrides we want to preserve are protected, we’ll clear this odd one. In some documents, I’ve encountered text with its color set to [None], or with Paragraph Shading enabled and set to the color of the text, and other strange “overrides” that one would never want.
But first, let’s save the overrides we do want.
Find/Change is so wonderful and powerful, I’ve given it an entire chapter in the Compendium part of this book. The following is a gentle introduction to its more powerful features.
Of course, we can use this feature to find a word or phrase and replace it with another. But much more powerfully, we can change formatting with it.
The initial section of the Find Format Settings dialog is for finding text that uses character or paragraph styles. But we are looking for text that does not yet have a character style applied, but is italicized. So…
This time, we are choosing a style: the one we’re applying to italicized text to keep it that way.
We’re now looking at:
Before the suspense builds up too greatly, I should warn you that the result of this search will not change how the text looks at all. I’ll remind you we’re preparing to clear unwanted overrides, so we need to protect the overrides we like.
This time, we are choosing a style to apply to bold text to keep it that way.
Now it’s time to clear out the other overrides that came over with the Word doc.
If you find yourself finding and changing the same things repeatedly, save the query you’re reinventing. To the right of the Query menu at the top of Find/Change is a cryptic button that saves the query in the menu with whatever name you give it. The engineers have populated that menu with some useful queries for you, too.
Note that to do this successfully, InDesign used a grep query: that’s why the Find what text looks so bizarre: ~b~b+. Grep uses code and the engineers who wrote that query know the code.
There is much more about grep and in the “Find/Change” chapter of the Compendium. Check it out!
Last, we search for the markup the writer inserted to find and format headers and subheads.
Each paragraph that begins with “<h1>” is now formatted correctly. But we no longer need that prefix. It’s easy to get rid of it:
Since there was nothing in the Change to or Change Format fields, InDesign assumes you are replacing text with literally nothing. Now for the subtopics.
Each paragraph that begins with “<sub>” is now formatted correctly. But we no longer need that prefix, either:
Our text should be formatted correctly now and free from any overrides from Word.