Import Word Files into InDesign, Remove Local Formatting but Keep Italics and Bold
Okay, it’s time to write up one of the most important “indesign secrets” of all… this is information that literally every InDesign user should know, but very few do: How to remove some of formatting on text, while leaving other formatting.
I use this technique almost everytime someone sends me a Word file. I place it, then realize there is a ton of local formatting everywhere that needs to be stripped out. I know there’s local stuff (formatting applied on top of the underlying paragraph style definition) in a couple of ways:
- When I try to apply some other paragraph style (or even character style) to the text, nothing happens, or part of the style is applied, but some seems to be ignored.
- Also, everyplace I place the text cursor, I see a plus (+) symbol in the paragraph styles panel:
The problem: Someone has applied local formatting (also called local overrides) on top of the paragraph style. For example, a lot of Word users like to select all the text and change the font or size to read it more easily. They don’t realize that this has just made your (InDesign user) life harder!
Fortunately, the solution is relatively easy. And there’s even ways to automate it, which I’ll get to in a minute.
The Three Step Solution
Here’s a three-step process that you can use to scrub your stories clean in InDesign:
- First, make character styles to match the styles you want to keep. For example, if the author used italic throughout, you’ll need a character style which applies italic to text. If they used bold (and it needs to stay bold), then you’ll need a bold character style:
- Next, use Find/Change to find all the text that looks italic, and apply the italic character style. It’s easy to do this by leaving the “find what” and “change to” areas blank, then clicking the large blank areas at the bottom of the dialog box:
- Finally, select all the text in the story (Cmd/Ctrl-A) and click the Clear Overrides button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. Most users don’t even know this button exists, but it’s awesome. It removes all the local formatting, but leaves the character styles.
The result: All the overrides you didn’t want are gone, and all the overrides you did want (italic, bold, etc.) remains!
Automating Cleanup
Obviously, if you had to do this to 50 stories a day, you’d get tired of the three-step process pretty fast. Fortunately, there are some ways to automate it. For example, my Blatner Tools suite of plug-ins from dtptools includes two features that are pretty nifty (if I do say so myself). First, there is a way to automatically create and apply the basic character styles for you. In other words, with one click, it will create italic, bold, and bold-italic styles, then do the find/change to apply them throughout your whole document:
Second, there’s a Clear Local Overrides dialog box that shows you what formatting has been applied over and above the paragraph styles and lets you strip it away with a single click. (You could actually use this one dialog box to clean up everything and get exactly what you want, even without creating character styles, but I still think it’s better to use character styles, because in the long run it’s more efficient and helpful.)
Many people told me that they wanted these features without having to buy all of Blatner Tools, so we released it as a separate package called Power Styles. [Note that both these tools are 30% off until Feb 15 this month! See comments below for discount code.]
There are many other clean-up tools available, some commercial, and some free. For example, TextSoap is a really cool Mac-only application that cleans up common text problems (double-hyphens, removing angle brackets from emails people send you, that kind of thing).
Are there other tools you like to use?
I don’t see anything at the Power Styles download page that says “30% off.” Is there anything I need to do in order to get the discount?
@Keith: Ah ha! So sorry… you can get 30% off both of these until Feb 15 by using the discount code 12IDSECRETS30 when buying at dtptools.com
There’s more on these plug-ins, including links to videos on this page.
Can you customize what the “Basic” character styles are? For example if I would like to add Superscript or Right-to-left text can I make those part of the basic character styles or would I have to go through the “Clear Local Overrides” dialog?
Alternatively, You can create those basic char-styles (simply in Character Styles palette) *without* any opened inDesign file to keep them in any created later document. With saved queries in “Find/Replace” dialog or with Your own definitions for “Find and Replace” script (one-click action), working with even extremely long/multiple text frames is a pretty nice combo
Simple tiny techniques in a clean, plugins-free inDesign, which You can always get (new workspace, for example).
Great tip Dave, but I do so wish this was an unnecessary conversation… Adobe!?
We have a fixed, regular workflow, and use a variant on your technique, applying a variety of Bold [75 or 95], Bold italic [76 or 96] and Superscript character styles in Word, mapping across using InDesign Import filters (which we also use to rip out unwanted styles), and then stripping out all Paragraph style overrides in InDesign. Works pretty well and the prep in Word can easily be automated using a macro. You’re now making me wonder whether better to in InDesign…
Something we’re still working to cleverly address is different weights, etc. (hence the 75/95 variants).
One lingering problem we’re working to erradicate is ‘artefacts’ that appear in text, which inexplicably (but far from always) show curly quotes, and em/en dashes as unrecognised characters. Very tedious.
You may already have these down, but our three top lessons learnt the hard way, and present across at least the last two or three versions of InDesign (Adobe!?) are:
Only use Word 2007 format for import (never Word 2010 or RTF, as both can cause probs)
Use Grep search and replace instead of standard search (which has for several versions had a horrific bug).
Beware hard spaces and hard dashes in Word index entries — these kill InDesign stone dead and take ages to erradicate manually from withing InDesign (any tips here?).
(Of course, that should be use only Word 2003 format!)
Thanks for the discount code.
BTW–I’ve seen the find/replace trick not work when the Word file was created from Pages. For whatever reason, InDesign sometimes doesn’t find those fake italics, even while it’s displaying them.
I have detailed information about using Word to avoid this mess here: http://www.mackeycomposition.com/MacKey_Composition_files/WordtoInDesign.pdf
Needs to be updated for the latest version of Word, but the principle is the same.
BogRoll, you say to “never use RTF” to import text; actually, the first step in our process is to convert everything to RTF and then pull in the RTF files. That’s because, depending on the number of editors (and their lack of formatting expertise in Word), the Word documents are usually a mess. Some of the manuscripts we pull in show all italics, for example. Simply saving it to RTF seems to minimize some of these initial formatting excesses — but that is just our experience.
Still, it is tedious to have to go through a multi-step process to clean up each document you import, just to get to a “baseline” where you can start to do the real layout work. I’m going to look at the Power Styles plug-in.
Great tip.
ID Secrets is a wonderful resource.
good solutions, but a previous post about something quite similar had an alternative which wasn’t covered in this post: http://indesignsecrets.com/free-scripts-help-fix-word-formatting.php
Sheri — I stand corrected! With coarser copy, we would certainly do things very differently.
I should have made clear some provisos: our copy is very structured and correct in terms of both formatting and styles when it reaches layout, so effectively we are looking to sync documents architectures, erradicate rubbish (errant styles and overrides), and optimise workflow.
RTF (surprisingly) and Word 2007/2010 (not so surprising) formats both cause us a lot of trouble (including InDesign CS5), whereas Word 2003 has proved very solid.
FYI: we work predominanty in a Windows environment, in case relevant. In fact, very curious to learn a lot more about the state of cross-platform compatibility (Word, InDesign and wider Creative Suite), since the Cult of Mac is creeping up again (I ran away screaming at its Power Mac nadir, ~1996!).
I have a request – is there any one-step way to get rid of blue hyperlinks from Word? I work primarily with print files and am constantly changing the text color back to black (from the default blue in Word) and removing the underline for the text.
Liked what you’ve mentioned so far; I don’t have boatloads of Word docs to import, but it’s still helpful.
Open the article in Word before you import it, select all the text, then press Command-6 (on the number line, not the keypad) or Control-6 on Windows.
That removes the links but keeps the link text.
Then import the file into ID.
I love this posting because it pertains to exactly what I deal with on a daily basis at my job.
My ultimate solution has always been create a WORD file template with all the styles in INDD synchronized to the WORD file.
However I’m tempted to buy your tool David. Baby Jesus knows I can’t always be so nice to folks. I only have two hands!
Very cool solution, but like LorettaVee, I also map Character Styles in Word and InDesign, spending a little extra time prepping the Word file, simply because the InDesign templates I use involve more complex formatting, plus the project I work on use characters that require a proprietary font that there are no substitutions for.
@ Joan Lordan, In the Styles and Formatting area in Word, there is usually a character style for Hyperlinks (blue and underline). I don’t even bother getting rid of the links themselves, but instead, just modify the style to use black text and no underline. No one is the wiser.
I recently purchase InDesign CS5.5 and was assured that I can Place documents created in iWorks Pages app. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to do this. I would appreciate it if anyone can explain, etc…
IMPORT WORD TABLES
thanks for the above discussion. would LOVE any input on importing Word TABLES into INDD 5.5. a single page table wants to come in as a graphic (uneditable) or in table BOXES (imagine 5 across, 8 down, each requiring the same formatting.) any suggestions, anyone?
David, thanks for this. I am still having problems. The editor has used faux italic in Word so there is no Word style to replace. When I import the doc into ID5 there are no words that look like italics – all the text comes in as Roman. This means that when I try your step_2 there is nothing relevant to put in the window.
Any suggestions gratefully accepted!
Thanks,
James
James, the usual faux italics should import fine into ID but appear as “missing font”. So your editor did something else; something that doesn’t leave any clues. That is, unless you are stripping all unknowns before processing the file. Perhaps you should check your Word Import settings for that.
Can you replace the formatting in Word with a real italic font?
I love you.