Reply To: Paragraph Styles Problem

Gert

Actually–we use XTags. I work mainly with books, and many times we have to have the manuscript re-keyed because it’s so heavily edited or a Word file is not available, so we mark it up with Quark codes as InDesigns tags are very lengthy.

Sometimes, we get a completely clean word file from the customer and they have tagged it with their own coding system (such as <TX> for regular text, <CT> for chapter opener, etc. We then just search and replace on those and put in the Quark coding. For those, we search for < and replace with the @ symbol. And the > and replace with the : symbol. And that gives us our Quark coding (i.e., @TX: @CT: , etc. Much shorter than ID’s naming convention.

We use Quark coding mainly because the tags are shorter, and XTags converts all Quark coding to InDesign coding.

If the manuscript is being rekeyed, our keyboarders key in the italic, bold, etc. codes, and the Quark codes (paragraph styles).

If it’s a clean word file, once I search & replace on the codes, I have a macro that captures italic, bold, small caps, superiors, etc. And it fixes things like spaced ellipses, spaced single and double quote combinations, removing double spaces, double paragraph returns, spaces at the beginning of a line, etc.

Then, whether we had it keyboarded or used the “clean file,” we save it as a .txt file, and run a second macro that does a few more things. And then we import it with XTags.

At one time I attempted a macro for something similar to you work flow, but nine times out of ten, the Word files we get weren’t done with paragraph formatting or character formatting. Everything is pretty much plain and styled by hand in Word.

And all of our books are different. While we use the same paragraph style sheet names and character style sheet names for all the books we do, we don’t have any templates. Every book is totally different.