InDesign & Word Styles – How well do they transfer with each other?
Word files (and their styles) usually import quite well, but sometimes the formatting may change. If you are in a workflow where you will need to be going back and forth between InDesign and Word, it might be helpful to know what will transfer correctly and what will not.
Importing Word Files into InDesign
A word document should import into InDesign looking the same as it did in Word, but everything does not always transfer correctly so it is import to take a look at what transfers and what does not.
What transfers well
- Basic font information – Font, weight, size, small caps, all caps, underline (see photo), strike-through, tracking
- Alignment & spacing – Space before/after, indents, alignment, leading
- Lists – Bullets and numbered lists. They will transfer, but you may have to redefine the style after import for the bullet/number settings to be updated on the style
What Transfers so/so
- Color – If it was green in Word, it will be green in InDesign. You will probably not like the name of the color or the fact that it will always be RGB
No Transfer
- Effects – Shadow, outline, emboss, engrave
- Shortcuts – If you word style had a shortcut, it will be lost
- Highlighting – Lost
- Borders/Shading – Lost
Conclusion
If InDesign has a comparable feature the style will translate quite well, but if there is no compatible feature (ex – borders/shading) the style attribute is lost.
Exporting text from InDesign to Word
What happens if you have already created and formatted the text inside InDesign and someone wants to have a word version of your file? While it is not possible to give them an editable version that fully represents your entire layout, you can give them a rich text document (.rtf) of your story which will be close to a word file. The downside of giving them a .rtf (select the text > file > export > rtf) is that you will lose some of the formatting that you have created when it is opened in word.
What transfers well
- Basic font information – Font, weight, size, small caps, all caps, tracking
- Alignment & spacing – Space before/after, indents, alignment, leading
What transfers so-so
- Underline/strike through – If your underline/strike through is thicker than 1 pt or you have offset it up or down those attributes will not transfer
- Scaling – Horizontal scaling will transfer, but vertical scaling and skew will not (you shouldn’t be using these anyway)
- Drop caps – while the look of the drop cap transfers, it is not very functional since the drop cap letters are in their own box (see photo)
- Color – Green will transfer to green, but forget about CMYK and spot colors
No Transfer
- Anything specific to InDesign (like GREP styles, paragraph rules, etc).
- Bullets and numbering – These are completely lost. You should convert them to text before export if you want them to transfer
- Baseline Shift
Conclusion
While it is possible to export your layout to word, only basic formatting will transfer. If you find yourself going back and forth with text changes and your text Adobe InCopy is a much better solution.
Hopefully Word 2010 will import even better since it supports opentype features.
 |
I got so frustrated with Word when I was doing a book in InDesign that I bought InCopy. For my newsletter, I do basic editing in Word and send it on to my copy editor. Once he’s done, the Word file is placed into a new InCopy file and I load paragraph styles from the last newsletter. Then I format the article in InCopy and place it via InDesign into my newsletter.
I’ve never had to do this, but you can back save an InCopy file to Word should you need to send it to someone. I try to avoid placing a Word file into InCopy until I’m sure it’s mine, all mine.
Her Geekness helped me with this workflow.
I hate Word, with a passion, but oftentimes there’s no way to avoid it. Unfortunately a lot of people love using Word. It’s their weapon of choice for anything from a simple letter to entire “magazine” layouts, usually all set up in Letter-sized pages than A4/A5, but also a favorite for sending images ? why send them separately if you can paste the images into a single Word file?
More on-topic: I have yet to receive Word files with styles set up for the formatting, but simply having to get rid of the formatting to replace it with my styles ticks me off, so I tend to copy all text and paste it into Notepad. I then copy everything from there and paste into InDesign and start adding formatting again.
I’m sure there’s an easier way, but this works pretty well.
Why do spaces in Helvetica Neue get converted to non-breaking spaces when exporting from InDesign to RTF?
Oh, and another problem: I use styles with the same names in Word and InDesign so that they map onto each other automatically. I often find that character styles set up in Word to be based on the ‘underlying paragraph style’, so without any font information, nevertheless come into InDesign locally formatted with Times New Roman.
And a weird one: if I’m importing Word documents with a character style for italic on some of the text, and in the corresponding InDesign paragraph style there is a GREP style to italicise some other text, the result in InDesign is that any text between GREP style italic text and character style italic text is also italic!
For people looking to “round-trip” from Indesign to Word and back to InDesign, there’s also Storytweaker by Rorohiko (which was mentioned here in March). It’s a little involved but for anyone who has to do this a lot and cannot expect all their partners to work with InCopy, it?s less work than re-marking up lost formatting.
Here?s that link to a step-by-step example of how Rorohiko?s StoryTweaker works mentioned in the InDesignSecrets post from March.
This is all excellent fodder for my upcoming session, “I Hate Word,” at the InDesign Conference tomorrow!
Actually the show organizers changed the name of the session to something less aggressive ;-) but the intent — making Word & ID play nicely together — is the same.
So thank you … and please chime in with any other interesting routines you go through or workarounds you’ve discovered that helps you deal with Word files. I’ll give you all full credit ;-) and refer people to this thread.
To follow up on Rhiannon’s comment, I have recently exported two InDesign files to rtf, and in both cases every space converted to a non-breaking space, regardless of font.
@AM – Of course, be sure the spread the workarounds and limitations.
@R Thomas Berner, Jakob – Yes, I am aware that InCopy and Story Tweaker are much better options, but some people will never use them. That said, it is good to know what will come in and what will not.
And something else I learned from Anne-Marie: If you make a change to your article in InDesign, the change is made in InCopy. So once you place a file from InCopy to InDesign, you don’t need to go back to InCopy for edits.
I don’t have much problem with the Word to ID import, probably because I strip out everything in the Word document before I copyedit and then I apply my own template, which includes style names that correspond to the ID styles. Then I minimize the problem of having too many styles in the Word doc by running a macro to delete all unused styles. Thus a matching, stripped down version is what gets placed in ID.
But occasionally I do have a strange (at least to me) problem. I do not use the Word Normal style, but it is one of those Word styles that can’t be gotten rid of. So when I’m finished editing and styling a Word file, Normal remains in the list of styles but marked as not used. All well and good. Then I run my macro to remove all unused styles (knowing that Normal will remain) and all of a sudden styled paragraphs have had their styles removed and replaced by Normal. I have yet to figure out what causes this, and it occurs only on occasional files, not all the time.
The only way I have found to combat this is to (a) save the correctly styled file before running the macro to delete unused styles and (b) if it happens, to close the now incorrect file without saving and reopen the correctly styled file and then manually remove unused styles.
By using my template and by running the macro to delete unused styles (which leaves me a correct file 98% of the time), when I place the file in ID, I only need to “define” one style, to-wit: Normal, which I define as the main paragraph style. If I was smart, I would just add a Normal style to my ID styles, but this is my little rebellion against Microsoft for making it impossible to simply get rid of the Normal style.
Hyperlinks transfer to InDesign quite well, even makes a hyperlink. Although I’d like an option to name the Hyperlink when it’s applied or a more informative Hyperlink name rather than Hyperlink 34 and so on.
And I hate the way the hyperlinks automatically have Visible Rectangles.
It would be interesting to see how Office 2010 scores up in this test. I am using 2010 tech beta at the moment, and I am loving it.
@Eugene: You can remove the visible borders with this one-line script:
app.documents[0].hyperlinks.everyItem().visible = false;
Is that a javascript harbs? I can’t tell.
@Top Clone Scripts – Have you tried Word 2010’s new opentype features? I am curious to see how well they import into InDesign.
Yes. It’s javascript.
Tip to tell script languages apart:
If it starts with “tell”, it’s AppleScript.
If it has a bunch of periods (i.e. app.documents…), and the text case is camelcase (i.e. starts with lowercase), it’s probably Javascript. If it has lines which start with “var” it’s also Javascript.
If there’s a declaration of the InDesign program in the beginning, it’s Visual Basic.
If I wrote it, you can bet on its being Javascript! ;)
I remember a tip from AM for getting rid of hyperlinks (and the annoying little boxes) in Word. I don’t remember the Windows shortcut but for Macs:
Highlight all text in the Word doc.
Hit command+6
Done
This has saved more hair pulling for me than you can imagine.
The totally cool thing is that even without the blue text, blue underline and black box, when I export my ID file to pdf the hyperlinks are recognized and I can click away on them in the pdf.
I wish Word would go away, but since it won’t, I wish they would tone down the hyperlink style.
Now…would you like to hear what I think of Microsoft “Punisher”?
I receive Word files from numerous different contributors/freelancers which I then work on in InCopy.
I would like to be able to apply my various Adobe paragraph styles without wiping out the basic character formatting (bold, italic and sub/superscript) they have previously applied to specific words within the article using Word.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
@gem: In general, this should work fine, as long as the paragraphs have some paragraph style applied to them already. If there’s no style applied to them, then InDesign can’t retain anything.
I have problems when I export an InDesign file to Word when it come to tables. The tables go black and I have to fix them in Word. Anyone else experience this problem?
J.A. –
If you are having problems with your word tables, you can always copy and paste the table into excel and then import the excel file into InDesign.
Thanks for the storytweaker link!
Will look for the correct discussion to ask about line breaks in hyperlinks when exporting from ID to PDF.
Hi all,
I use this macro to convert all lists (bulleted and numbered list) to manual lists, that can be imported into Indesign without loss the bullets and numbered lists. It may be helpful to you.
Sub ConvertAutoNumsandBullets1()
ActiveDocument.ConvertNumbersToText
Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
Selection.Copy
Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = ChrW(61623)
.Replacement.Text = ChrW(183)
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub
Hi all,
In my documents I use two languages arabic and english
In word I can edit the font size for each language alone by (latin text and complex scripts)
Does I can do that in indesign?
Mokdad: I recommend you ask this question on our Forums where more people can see it. :-)
With havin so much written content do you ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright violation? My blog has
a lot of completely unique content I’ve either authored myself or outsourced but
it looks like a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my permission. Do you know any solutions to help protect
against content from being stolen? I’d genuinely appreciate it.