If you had your choice of what type of file to import into InDesign, which would you pick?
1) A Word file
2) A tagged text file
For years (I’m talking decades), we’ve always provided our customers with tagged files (back when we used Quark and now with InDesign) when they wanted to page a book in-house. We also use tagged text files for when we page it ourselves. We never had a problem.
Workflow is basically, they send us the manuscript (which is either clean [i.e., no corrections/editing] or one they have marked with their fixes and changes. We then either tag the file or if it’s really messy from all the editing we have it double-keyed, with the style sheet names.
We then run macros to capture things like italic, bold, small caps, superior, etc. And another one that puts thin spaces between the periods in the ellipses, tracking between single and double quotes, tracking before superior figures (i.e., note or footnote callouts), etc. The macros really make everything consistent.
All we (or the designer) has to do with the file is place the file into InDesign, which is no different than placing a Word file.
But now something has changed. Several publishers have told us soon they will not want tagged text files, but want Word files. And the Word files have to be styled with Word’s paragraph and character styles.
To me that seems counterproductive and very time-consuming. I mean, to me it will take twice as long then simply tagging it and running our macros.
And I know that importing Word files does require finessing things, fixing font conflicts, style sheet conflicts, etc. And a lot of the stuff our macros fix will then have to be fixed by hand by the designer who importst the Word file (either manually or by search and replace).
I just don’t get it.
So I’m curious, if you had a choice, would you rather import a Word file or a tagged file?
NOTE: If the concern is wanting to see the manuscript itself, they would have the original that we tagged from or double-keyed from.
And I guess I’m looking for a way to convince these folks and my bosses that it will take more time to style Word files than to tag them. And to add, they will expect those Word files to flow in perfectly. They won’t want to mess around with any font conflicts or style conflicts. They will definitely blame us for that.
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