Lesson G: Placing a Word Document

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:

• Open the downloaded document called 3 Text Styles.indd and go to the page 10–11 spread. View the whole spread (⌘-option-0/Ctrl-Alt-0).
• Use the Selection tool to select the text frames on each page. They may be hard to see since they have no text in them and they are coincident with the margins. Select the frame on page 10. Look at either the Control panel or the Properties panel (the latter requiring you to scroll down to the Text Frame section) and note that this frame has only one column: .
• Give the frame two columns.
• Select the frame on page 11 and give it four columns.
• Select the first frame (the one with two columns on page 10) again. Using the Selection tool, click the out port: the small box just above the lower-right corner of the frame. Your cursor will change to show that it’s ready to “thread” this frame to another. When you hover your cursor over the heart of the frame on page 11, it will change to show you that it will be linked with the other:

• When you see the link cursor, click. You should see at least a small arrow in the second frame’s in port (near its upper-left corner). If you don’t see a line connecting the two frames, go to View > Extras > Show Text Threads. Now you have six columns for the six topics coming your way.

Note: When placing text, we should set our default paragraph style to the one that will be applied to the most text:

• Deselect all by pressing ⌘-shift-A/Ctrl-Shift-A. In the Paragraph Styles panel, highlight body copy.
• When nothing’s selected, be sure no character style is ever highlighted. In the Character Styles panel, click [None].

Example 1: In a Perfect World

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.

Showing Import Options

• Go to the File menu and choose Place….
• At the bottom of the Place dialog box, check the box labeled Show Import Options. This is extremely important when placing any kind of text file so you can control whether and how formatting comes with the text.
• Navigate to the file called Content_ideal.docx. Highlight it and click Open, or simply double-click the name. You’ll now see the Import Options.

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.

• Enable Customize Style Import and click the Style Mapping… button.

At the top, Word’s presumptuously named Normal seems to be used and has no match in our document.

• Use the menu to the right of Normal to choose body copy, as that’s our most generic style.

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.

• Choose spicy from the list to the right of for InDesign.
• If there are any other near misses (styles that are not quite named the same), “map” those, too, then click OK.
• Click OK in the Import Options dialog, and your cursor will be loaded.
• With the loaded cursor, click in the heart of either frame (since they’re linked together, the text will flow between them). If the styles apply as they should, the formatting is done!

Wasn’t that wonderful? It’s a shame, then, that almost no one gets to enjoy such a workflow.

• Undo (⌘-Z/Ctrl-Z): The first undo will remove the text but reload the cursor. A second undo will leave you with the empty but ready text frames.

Example 2: In the Real World

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.

Showing Import Options

• Go to the File menu and choose Place….
• At the bottom of that dialog box, check the box labeled Show Import Options.
• Navigate to the file called Content_typical.docx. Highlight it and click Open, or simply double-click the name. You’ll now see the Import Options.

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.

• In the Formatting part of the Import Options dialog, select Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables and Preserve Local Overrides. Click OK.
• When your cursor is loaded, click in one of the two frames on the spread.
• In the Type menu, choose Show Hidden Characters if they aren’t already showing.

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.

• But insert your cursor in some generic text—text that isn’t bold, italic, or pink.
• Look at the Paragraph Styles panel and note the plus sign indicating that there is an override at your cursor’s location. Hover the cursor over body copy and a tip will appear identifying the override:

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.

Clean Up & Formatting with Find/Change

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.

Control the Scope of Find/Change

• Summon the Find/Change window with a nicely intuitive shortcut: ⌘-F/Ctrl-F. If nothing is selected, it will default to searching the entire document: note the menu labeled Search. If the text cursor is blinking in a story, the scope of the search will most likely be Story.
• That’s what we’d like here, so ensure your cursor is still in the text we just placed. Be very careful if you highlight any text because that tends to set the scope of the search to only the highlighted text and nothing else!

Applying Styles with Find/Change

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.

• Click in the rectangle below the words Find Format, and a dialog box will open.

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…

• Go to the Basic Character Formats section of the Find Format Settings dialog. In the Font Style menu, choose Italic, then click OK. The Find Format box looks like this now:

• Click in the rectangle below the words Change Format, and the Change Format Settings dialog box will open.

This time, we are choosing a style: the one we’re applying to italicized text to keep it that way.

• In the Character Style menu of that dialog, choose my italic, then click OK.

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.

• Click Change All. To confirm that something happened, insert the cursor in italicized text. The Character Styles panel should show you that my italic is applied now.
• Use the small trash can icons to clear both the Find Format and Change Format fields. Now we’re ready to do the same thing to bold text in the story.
• Click in the rectangle below the words Find Format. The Find Format Settings dialog opens.
• Go to the Basic Character Formats section and in the Font Style menu, choose Bold then click OK.
• Click in the rectangle below the words Change Format. The Change Format Settings dialog box opens.

This time, we are choosing a style to apply to bold text to keep it that way.

• In the Character Style menu of that dialog, choose my bold then click OK.
• Click Change All. To confirm that something happened, insert the cursor in bold text. The Character Styles panel should show you that my bold is applied.

Now it’s time to clear out the other overrides that came over with the Word doc.

• Select all the text in the story—five clicks with the Type tool or ⌘-A/Ctrl-A will do the trick. At the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel, click the Clear Overrides button:

Saving Queries

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.

• In this story’s text, there are many extraneous paragraph returns. In the Query menu, choose Multiple Return to Single Return then click Change All. You’ll find there were about 29 extra returns.

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.

• In the Query menu, choose Multiple Space to Single Space. This search text looks even more strange and daunting. Nonetheless, click Change All to get rid of over 50 useless spaces.

  There is much more about grep and in the “Find/Change” chapter of the Compendium. Check it out!

• Just below the Query menu, click on Text to get back to more ordinary text searches.

Last, we search for the markup the writer inserted to find and format headers and subheads.

• Be sure to have cleared the previous format searches (use the trash can icons).
• In the Find what field, type “<h1>” (notice that there are six instances of this in the text).
• Click in the rectangle below the words Change Format. The Change Format Settings dialog box opens.
• In the Paragraph Style menu of that dialog, choose topic header then click OK.
• Click Change All.

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:

• Leave the Find what field alone, but clear the Change Format field with its trash can icon.
• Click Change All.

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.

• In the Find what field, type “<sub>” (notice that these are scattered about in the text).
• Click in the rectangle below the words Change Format.
• In the Paragraph Style menu of the Change Format Settings dialog, choose subtopic and click OK.
• Click Change All.

Each paragraph that begins with “<sub>” is now formatted correctly. But we no longer need that prefix, either:

• Leave the Find what field alone, but clear the Change Format field with its trash can icon.
• Click Change All.

Our text should be formatted correctly now and free from any overrides from Word.