Typophile

InDesign novice, text flow & character style problem / question

W1

Hi there

I'm in the middle of laying out a book for the first time; I know a small bit of InDesign and am fairly ok with character styles.
What I'm not so clued up on is importing text from MS Word into InDesign. Here's my problem...

I had effectively laid the entire book out, using text copied and pasted (not imported) from Word, and painstakingly manually
applied character styles (italics where needed, superscript etc...). I realise now not the cleverest way to do it, but anyway, it's done.
BUT – the client has now come out of nowhere with a rewrite of the text, and a fresh set of word files (no track and change and it's not an option for me to ask for this).

What I want to find out is if, rather than me having to go through that whole slow, clunky process again, is there a way to link the current InDesign layout to the new Word files and somehow get it to update with all character styles intact? Does that make sense?

Any help appreciated, sorry in advance if this is a basic thing to ask!

Juergen Weltin

Have you tried to search an InDesign user forum? There are various out there.

forrest

I think you need to find a way to bill the client more. If the client told you the orginal text was final and it wasn't, they're making you do unplanned work.

djprescott

Using the 'Get Text' function rather than copying and pasting should do this for you. If all the styles haven't been retained, just do an advanced search and replace procedure to apply them.

djprescott

Or rather 'Place' Was thinking of Qk!

James Michaels

If you want to import styles or style sheets, import the text via the File > Place command. When you're asked to navigate to the file to place, be sure the "Show Import Options" checkbox at the bottom is checked. This will bring up the screen of import options shown below, and you can tell InDesign how to handle the Word file's style sheets. See InDesign's "help" files for more info about what the various options do.


Dave Williams

Don't forget that you can do "Compare documents" back in Word (as a sort of retrospective 'track changes') to see what he's amended (assuming it's not 100% different!). I occasionally find people resubmitting new manuscripts after the typesetters have started work on what was supposed to be the final version, and sometimes it turns out there's one new paragraph in the middle, and the odd word changed here & there, and that's it...

(Worse is when you send 'em a PDF proof, and they export it back into Word, make changes, and send THAT back to you. Noooooooo, you f***ers!!)

Florian Hardwig

You will want to check out the preptext script by fellow typophile Theunis.

W1

Thank you all for your replies. A combination of Place text and Thenius' script is semi-working, so somewhat helpful.
I am finding it a bit unpredictable still – for whatever reason some text imports without any style applied, despite assigning a style
in the import options, so I'm having to manually apply, which is slow. Is there a quick way to ask InDesign to identify X font and to apply Y character style to all instances?

It doesn't help that Word is such a clunky mess; trying to coincide styles is a struggle!

Thanks in advance.

John Nolan

"Is there a quick way to ask InDesign to identify X font and to apply Y character style to all instances?"

That's easily done in the search dialogue panel; just use "Find format" and "Change format".

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