Indesign, import styled word docs 1

[cubsdude]

I'm not new to indesign, just this group, but after years and years of using quark I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with Indesign.

Our editors "style" the manuscript pages in word so (like in quark) we pick up the articles and just flow them in and as long as the style name matches you essentially have a complete and styled article almost complete in layout. However, since we are in CS2 (and the editors have switched to word from office 2003 XP) the styles are all coming in with character styles attached (BAAAAAD character styles, at least from the stand point of coming from word) and the paragraph styles have a plus sign (+) next to them. Meaning they are not pure and correct.

Has anyone experienced this and if so, how did you fix it?

 

[Eggles]

When you place the Word docs in ID, do you check the box marked 'Import Options'? This will allow you to map the Word styles to those set up in the ID doc and hopefully will give better results.

I personally hate Word and its styles and always choose to do all formatting in ID, but if you're stuck with this workflow of yours, try using the import options available.

 

[cubsdude]

Unfortunately I am stuck with the word wrokflow and so far the "import options" have made no difference or made things worse. Any other ideas?

 

[jmgalvin]

It's kind of hard to understand the problem since you say: "and the editors have switched to word from office 2003 XP". Isn't Office 2003 the latest version?

If you mean that they got Office 2003 I could see a lot of problems due to the collaboration features, if used, alowing any number of people to make various "styles". Perhaps you could be more specific as to the problems encountered vis a vis character and paragraph styles.

Have you downloaded the 4.02 Indesign update, which does have some fixes for text import? If not, you might try that.

Depending on the size of your operation, you seem to be an ideal candidate for Adobe InCopy, a product that would seem to help your editors "style" things and still integrate well with InDesign and Word.



Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[cubsdude]

jmgalvin,
windows 2003 is latest version. However, we're already testing incopy and the import problems I'm having are directly related to word bringing its own styles in. I have solved the problem though. It was fairly simple. All I had to do was delete all the "Extra" paragraph and character styles that word had been importing into indesign and reimport the document and it came in as it was supposed to. Thanks for all your input.

I do have another question. Has Anyone figured out why styles in Indesign are case sensitive? Has anyone figured out how to "Fix" That? In other words 2 styles with the exact same name, spaces, character count etc., except one is intial cap and the other is all lower case Indesign treats them as 2 different styles. Any thoughts?

 

[Eggles]

>>Has Anyone figured out why styles in Indesign are case sensitive<<

Because it reads them as two different things. If you have that situation, drag the duplicate down to the trash bin at the bottom of the styles palette. You will be asked what you want to replace the style with, then you can choose the alternative, and you are left with just one style of that name. I seem to recall if any of the styles were Word styles, then a little computer disk showed on the right of the style name. These should definitely be trashed, by the prscedure mentioned above.