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The Radio 3 Boards > General Chat > The Coffee Bar > The IT Helpdesk. > Pasting text from Word into InDesign (Adobe CS3)
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Author Topic: Pasting text from Word into InDesign (Adobe CS3)  (Read 79 times)
time_is_now
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« on: 13:08:57, 25-09-2008 »
While I'm at it, trying to solve all my technical issues ...

Are there any InDesign users out there? I regularly copy-edit and proof-read booklets for CD labels, which involves me preparing a brief in Word and then sending it to a designer who puts it all into InDesign. I've never used InDesign myself (I tried to install it on my laptop to see how it works but it wouldn't let me install ... that's another story for another day!).

One of the things that seems to be most time-consuming for my designer, and also wastes a lot of my time since he frequently gets it wrong and I have to keep an eye out for this when proofing, is that when he pastes text from Word into InDesign it loses italics (and also presumably bold etc., although it's the italics I've noticed), and he has to re-input them all manually. I can't believe there isn't a proper interface for this, but the other designer I sometimes work with also doesn't seem to be aware of a solution ... Does anyone have any ideas? I'd be quite happy to spend a bit more time defining styles in some other way in the original Word document if it meant I could be guaranteed they were transferred into the design files with fewer mistakes.
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
IgnorantRockFan
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« Reply #1 on: 09:07:00, 26-09-2008 »
I've never used InDesign "for real" but I have evaluated it for possible use (and rejected it as not being what we needed).

The trick to the import, as I recall, was to do all your formatting as Word styles (this is general good practice in Word anyway). So instead of hitting the I button or pressing Ctrl-I button to make italics, you will have a defined character style that is "base font + italic", and you apply that style to any text you want in italics. Make sure you name your styles appropriately to give a hint to the InDesign user what you want them to look like.

Then your InDesign colleague should map the Word styles to suitable InDesign styles when he imports the doc. I don't recall the exact options to do this but hopefully the InDesign user will know.

I'm not sure whether the InDesign user has to repeat the mapping for each new document (which would be a pain) or whether he can set up some kind of template/default mapping to handle every document.

Sorry, my InDesign knowledge ends at about this point...
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Allegro, ma non tanto
time_is_now
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« Reply #2 on: 09:14:12, 26-09-2008 »
Thanks, IRF! Smiley

I actually wondered if doing it with styles might work, but the designer I'd asked about it said he'd never used Word. Cheesy I'll send him a sample done that way and have a go. I must admit, I don't usually format odd words within a line as styles, and it's those odd words that seem to cause the problems ...

Sounds hopeful! Smiley
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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