Thanks!
Steve

Try this link and this link.

1. Import the word file to a blank indesign file and export out again as a .rtf, this cleans up rogue styles.

2. Import the new rtf into the layout. Mapping styles is easier now, as there are less to deal with and saving the Preset in the Mapping Styles helps a treat.

3. I have a script that was free, preservelocalformatting.jsx that was supplied on this site as a link to Dave Saunders blog. It’s fantastic, you just run the script and it adds the character styles.

4. Once that is done, you simply select all the text you imported and hit the Paragraph Override button.

The text is formatted and ready to go.

Of course it helps to go through the word document and know what styles are what. I usually clean up the Word styles to names similar to my InDesign styles, wherever possible.

It’s fine though because we create styles in Word anyway first, then have them edited and sent back for importing to InDesign.

The key here to remember is that InDesign and Word consider Character styles *VERY* differently, but they consider Paragraph Styles almost indetically. So if you set up the Char’s like your Para’s, you’re screwed. That’s why I could make a Word file with just Paragraph styles come in fine, but introduce Character styles, and all bets were off.

An easy way to wrap your head around this is to do the following.

Make a rudimentary InDesign file with just one Character Style in it (it can have multiple Paragraph styles… I’m just saying one Char style to keep it simple. Also, try to make it visibly different from your standard text so you can find it easily). Apply it to some text in your paragraph and export the story as an RTF. When you open the file in Word, you’ll see it completely ignores your ID Char Style and treats it as just local formatting.

Here’s the weird bit: highlight that styled text, and create a new Character Style within Word named just as you have it in your InDesign file (keeping in mind what David says above about avoiding any underlying “Normal” or “Deafult Paragraph” styles they are based on).

Now, when you import that Word file *back* into a fresh ID file, the text will import correctly with no oddball overrides or style breakages.

And seriously, those Character Styles generated out of Word were not only overriding whatever I had set in InDesign, occassionally they would break EVERY SINGLE STYLE in the InDesign document (I think that was partially due to the Normal and Default Paragraph junk under the Paragraph and Character Styles, respectively). In fact, it was breaking so badly, even removing overrides did nothing. Bizarrely, the Paragraph Style palette would appear correctly with no + signs, and opening the Style itself showed everything was fine, yet on the ID page, it was obeying the linked Word document’s concept of what that style should look like no matter what. The only way to recover was to throw out the ID document and start from a fresh one, as even importing new basic TXT files would adopt the MSWord-mangled style definitions.

Note, this technique also uses David’s recommendation to use InDesign as a filter to wring out the stupid from Styles BEFORE Word can get its hands on them. Side benefit is that, if your editors have your fonts, they also get to see, in a basic way, how the text will look via the RTF you exported.

Now, I’m just eagerly awaiting someone to do a big review on Footnotes and getting them to link predictably, too.