I am posting a message asking for help with Word Import.
Background:
I am a single person, not an organization, and I want to edit files in Word (2010) and then import into InDesign (currently have CS5, willing to upgrade to CS5.5 if it will solve my problem).
The reason I want to use Word is that I am doing academic documents, and need to use the program EndNote to enter references, in the standard medical style, into my documents. EndNote has an addin for Word that makes this seamless as one is writing. EndNote will not work with InDesign so it's necessary to use Word and then import.
The standard medical format is to have the references at the end, in order of citation. And the reference citations or calls are superscripted numbers in the text at the end of a sentence or phrase.
I have a fair bit of experience with this process. I started editing text files in XyWrite II+/Note Bene and importing into Ventura Publisher back in the DOS days, before Windows was available.
I have been using Word Import with InDesign since version 2.0 (and it's never quite worked right).
I have a fair bit of expertise with Word Styles, having used them since Word first allowed styles.
I am happy to set up my Word files in either .doc or .dox format, whichever works better.
I am intimately familiar with the mapping of Word styles to InDesign styles, having been trying to get this to work since InDesign 2.0.
I am willing to configure my Word styles however necessary to get them to import into InDesign, and to embed them in normal.dotm, and to use them religously without other styles.
I have spent hours browsing these forums, and the thread that seemed to offer the most hope is this one: Is clean Word import actually possible?
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3093709#3093709
I have spent 24 hours of time on this issue with Word 2010 and InDesign CS5 over the past few weeks and am getting very frustrated. I am going to post my experience here and see if I can get the problem selved, and if not, will call tech support as a last-ditch effort.
Details:
I want to have the following styles mapped in Word and InDesign.
A standard paragraph style.(e.g., Body Text)
A style for the first paragraph after a header (e.g., FirstPara), which is based on body text but has a 2-line drop cap.
A character style for the first few letters of FirstPara to make them smallcaps. (I don't want to use a nested style, as _I_ want to choose how many letters are going to be smallcaps, rather than a predefined number.)
A style for a blockquote, based on body text (e.g., BlockQuote)
A style for bullets, based on body text. (e.g., Bullet)
A style for references, based on body text, but much smaller (e.g., BackMatter)
I want these styles to be visible in Word, though not necessarily looking like the results in InDesign. For example, I set FirstPara in Word to be in dull red, just so it's quite visible which paragraphs have this style, as Word can't do drop caps as part of a style.
My text will have occasional italics, occasional bold, and fairly frequent superscripted numbers placed automatically by EndNote. The references at the end will be inserted automatically by EndNote, but it's easy enough to format with a Word style.
And that's it. Nothing very fancy.
Problem:
If I save my text as a .doc file (Word 2003 and earlier), and import it, virtually all the Word style attributes appear in InDesign as overrides. None of my text looks like I formatted in InDesign at all.
If I save my text as a .docs file (Word 2007-2010), the Word style attributes do not come over as much, but I have two other problems. First, my 2-line drop caps actually look like three-line drop caps, and loom above the line, because the 12-point text from the Word style comes through as an override. Second, after every superscripted number (and there are a lot of them) the text does _not_ go back to normal, but stays superscripted.
Attempted Solutions:
Based on advice found in this forum, I have tried a number of potential fixes.
1. Instead of Word's bultin italics and bold, use Word character styles for these. (I even redefined my keyboard in Word to format with these character styles instead of standard bold and italic. Even though it didn't work, I like the idea of having character styles for these in Word and may keep this.)
Then, once you've imported your text, you can select all text (a quintuple-click will work) and clear all overrides. But since your bold and italic in the imported file are really character styles, they will _not_ be cleared. That part works like a charm.
However, the superscripted numbers automatically inserted by EndNote are formatted as superscript and I cannot persuade EndNote to use a style instead. And, I doubt I would be able to find all of the superscripted numbers and reformat them using a character style without (a) a lot of effort, and (b) likely missing quite a few.
So this won't work for me, but it may work for others. Seems that using the older .doc file works best with this method, at least for me.
2. It has been suggested in this forum that no styles to be mapped from Word to Indesign should be based on the bultin Word "Normal" Style. So I made up a new set of Word Styles, replacing my Body Text with a new Body style based on nothing, and based all my variants on Body rather than Body text.
Made no difference.
3. I observed that the Word bultin styles Body Text, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and Heading 4, all are both character AND paragraph styles. This is _not_ like InDesign's nested styles, however. In Word, these styles may be applied to a whole paragraph or just a length of text, being interpreted as paragraph or character style appropriately. I don't see the point, but thought it might be a source of the problems. I'd already eschewed Body Text in favor of my own Body style, which was _only_ a paragraph style. So I then replaced Heading 1 with a new H1, which was not based on anything, and then new H2, 3 and 4 styles, all based on H1.
Made no difference.
4. I thought it might have something to do with the text file I was using. So I copied all the text, and pasted into brand-spanking-new Word files. Saved as both .doc and .docx format. Tried Placing both.
Made no difference.
Bottom Line:
For me, I think the best option is to save my files as .docx and import that way. I can then manually select each dropcap and clear overrides. I can then fix the extended superscript problem manually. This seems to require the least amount of manual labor.
Despite years of trying, I have yet to find a way to make InDesign's Word Import work they way it's suppoed to. There's always something that doesn't work right. But with Word 2010 and InDesign CS5, it seems a bit worse than usual.
Sorry for the long post, but I though others might find this informative if not actually helpful.
Any insight on this perennial problem welcomed.
