Reply To: New to InDesign — Book Creation MS Word-InDesign Workflow Question

You can save yourself buckets of time by properly formatting your Word file with styles. Heading1 for chapter titles, Heading2 for subtitles, Emphasis for italicized text, and so on. If you find yourself clicking on the font box in Word, choose a style instead. That way when you import your Word file into ID the styles will map to ID styles and you can automate things like starting chapters on right-hand pages. Click Show Import Options on the import dialog to get to the import optionspanel, then click the Customize Style Import / Style Mapping button at the bottom to open the mapping dialog.

If you don't have any styles in your ID document, you'll see New Paragraph Style or New Character Style listed next to all of the styles that ID found in the Word document. That's fine, ID will create the styles for you, and you can go back and edit them later if you wish.

In our shop our workflow uses Word for copyedit, then we import to ID for layout, and further proofreading edits are done in ID. There's a standard set of Word styles that we use to tag the Word docs. We publish 200 or so books each year, so process efficiency is high on our list of priorities.

Perry
KidPub Press