Mapping MS Word styles to InDesign styles in style groups

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    • #89295
      Aaron Gray
      Participant

      I work with a group of writers who tried writing in InCopy but didn’t like it and switched back to Microsoft Word, so now I’ve been having them write off of Word templates that I’ve created containing style names that match the style names on the InDesign template, so that the copy comes in (mostly) formatted.

      This all worked beautifully until I tried setting up a Microsoft Word template mapping to an InDesign template in which all the styles are collected inside various style groups. I’m finding that instead of the Word styles mapping to the InDesign styles, the Word styles just come in as a copy with the little icon next to them that indicates they have been imported.

      Is there any way to set up the Word style, such as by writing the style name a certain way in Word, that would trigger it to look inside the appropriate style group when it comes into InDesign?

      I realize that one solution would be to create a custom Word import preset, but the way the designers in my group bring in copy (drag and drop from an InDesign panel connected to the Woodwing Enterprise publishing system) is not conducive to that.

    • #89297

      I don’t think there is, though I’m not 100 percent positive of it.

      I personally hate it when designers give me an ID file with the stylesheets within style folders. I use xTags and and it doesn’t play well with those folders (or I’m doing something wrong).

      I only use Word as a necessary evil, so I don’t know if you can do anything within Word to fix your problem–but I’m guessing no as Word is pretty much a word procesing program. Maybe something could be done via macros?

    • #89302

      Hi Aaron,

      style groups are something unic to InDesign. So a style group outside of InDesign is seen as ‘paraStyle (stylegroup)’. In this case, the hierachy is lost.

      So there are only two ways to solve this:
      1. Map the styles during the import
      2. Map the styles after the import with a script

      I could imagine, that ‘2.’ will maybe work in a Woodwing environment too.

      Kai

      P.S.: If they don’t like InCopy, they had the wrong training for that!

    • #89307
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      This problem with mapping styles inside groups is one of my biggest complaints about InDesign. It is soooooooo frustrating!!

    • #89308
      Aaron Gray
      Participant

      Thanks for the feedback! Does anyone know of a script that would delete specific paragraph and character styles and replace them with other styles (basically a style of the same name, but located within a certain style group)? I don’t know how to write scripts from scratch, but if I had one as a starting point I might be able to modify it to do what I need.

    • #89311

      Here is a basic idea: https://forums.adobe.com/message/8559488#8559488

      But maybe there is more than one style or maybe there are styles with the same names in different locations …

      So, a script could loop through all paragraph styles with specific names, e.g. ‘paraStyleName (styleGroupName)’ and check, if a group ‘styleGroupName’ is available. If so, check further if inside this group a style ‘paraStyleName’ is valid. If both checks are true, paraStyleName (styleGroupName) would be removed and the right style could be applied.

      Kai

    • #89314
      Aaron Gray
      Participant

      Kai, I was able to use the script at that link as a jumping off point to create my own script that is accomplishing what I need it to. Thank you so much for the help!

      Aaron

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