Erm. Good question. I thought using ~b was brilliant because I thought, ‘well, David is using it, so it must be a better way of marking returns’. Turns out it’s what you get when inserting a “standard paragraph break” from the menu … It appears to do exactly the same as \r. (And, oddly, in regular text, you can insert ‘^b’ from the menu, which works the same as ‘^p’.)

Part of my macro routine with the Word file is to clean up unneeded things like extra spaces and returns, and to remove unused styles. I also convert bulleted and numbered lists to fixed lists and whittle away at author used styles so that what I end up with is Normal, Italic, and Bold.

I then save the .edit file and open my standard ID Word template and import the file. Now that it is in my ID template, I select all text and make it all BodyText and convert instances of italic and bold to the appropriate character style. I then edit and style the document.

When done, I run a macro to remove all unused styles from the file and save it yet again. It is this version that I place into my ID template for the book. When I place it, I always use Place options so that I can map styles. This gives me an opportunity to redirect any stray Word style that still lingers, usually just Normal, but occasionally a stray character style.

I have found this to be the most efficient route and one that lets me edit and typeset a 200-page book in a relatively short amount of time. I haven’t yet found a quicker method. I have tried exporting to RTF but that doesn’t solve my styles problem and I have found it quicker to actually apply styles in Word than in ID.

Thanks jongware for your cool grep (?<!~b)~b(?!~b)
Normally I need 3 passes for nearly the same result like your one line:
1. \r\r replace with ###
2. \r replace with one space
3. ### replace with \r

I’ll use a common Space After amount on bodies of text that have different styles with different Space Before amounts. That way if I need to add or lose some small amount of leading, I change the Space After in the base style instead of tweaking the different Space Befores

But if there’s a mistake in the supplied file and I change the supplied file, then I’m culpable for the mistake, well it could be construed that way.

I get the file in Word, I don’t even open it (well maybe to print it out so I have a copy to go off when laying out the text).

Then I import to a blank file, remove all the stuff that’s not needed, like double spaces, double paragraph returns, multiple tabs etc. Then export that back to RTF. Then I import my version of the RTF into the layout.

The reason for the above is to remove unused Word styles. It can be done from Word, but I don’t really want to open or change anything from a supplied file.

I prefer working the text in InDesign anyway, i’m used to the Find and Replace and have multiple grep searches already in place to remove any bad typesetting things that people do, who aren’t professional and I’m fine with that. The first 15 minutes is spent tidying up their file. Always is.

Do you receive rewrites to ID files where people have added extra returns to the already once set ID files?

If not and you are talking about original manuscript that you receive in Word or similar format, isn’t it easier to do the cleanup in Word?