Formatting in a Flash

As designers, many of us work with collaborators whose primary role is writing, not copy editing. These folks produce the all-important text, but they never format it with styles (gasp!). Instead, they simply apply manual formatting as they deem necessary. This presents us with a choice: We could try to educate and persuade them to be diligent about using styles, or we could let them focus on what they do well—creating content—and accept that the formatting and layout is up to us. You pick your battles. Admittedly, it can be daunting when you’re facing a pressing deadline and receive a boat load of text content that is entirely unstyled (but has plenty of manual formatting). This scenario happened to me recently. My client delivered more than 50 Word files that had to be flowed into an InDesign template and styled. The good news: The Word files were consistently formatted. The bad news: The Word users did not use any paragraph or character styles. None. All the formatting was manually applied on top of Word’s Normal style. To further complicate matters, my client wanted to continue managing the Word content in place (meaning, they did not want me to fix the Word files by applying styles to the text, nor was training the collaborators to do so an option). And the client wanted to have the text linked to their unstyled Word files after it had been flowed into InDesign, so they could dynamically update everything. Other solutions that might have helped, like InCopy or WordsFlow, weren’t on the table. But I love a challenge, and I love efficiency, so I persevered. Let

me walk you through how I tackled this project, in case you’re faced with a similar scenario.

Determine What You Have

First, look at what you have to work with. In my example, each Word file contained text with four distinctly different font appearances plus two additional direct formatting styles (bold and italic) within the Normal style—all of which needed to be formatted with paragraph or character styles (Figure 1).

In your InDesign template, identify which paragraph and character styles should be used. For more information on creating styled InDesign templates, check out this video by Erica Gamet. Next, look at your paragraph styles in InDesign. For my project, I needed four paragraph styles: body, project name, project location, and project stats (Figure 2). I also used two character styles: bold and italic. To automate as much as you can and make the process efficient, use a combination of linking Word files, style mapping, find/change queries, and a script.

Prepare to Link Word Files

Because you want the files to be dynamically linked, you need to enable an option in InDesign’s preferences before placing the files. With your styled InDesign file open (so this preference change will affect that file only), choose InDesign > Preferences > File Handling (macOS) or Edit > Preferences > File Handling (Windows). Under Links, enable Create Links When Pasting Text and Spreadsheet Files (Figure 3).

Map Your Style

With the file handling preference set, try placing a Word file to ensure you get the desired results. Choose File > Place (Command/Ctrl+D) and navigate to one of the Word files; for the example, I selected a file called Elm Street Design. Shift-click Open to see Word’s Import Options. Select Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Table, as well as Customize Style Import. Click the Style Mapping button (Figure 4).

Once in the Style Mapping dialog box, select the Word style on the left and choose the InDesign style that you want the Word style mapped to on the right. In this case, there’s not much mapping to do, because only one style (Normal) was used in the Word files. Once you have your mapping set up, you can save it as a preset for next time. Click the Save Preset icon. Name your preset something obvious, like Normal to body (Figure 5). Click OK. Now, as you place the text, not only will Word’s paragraph styles come in with your InDesign styles applied, you will also see the DOCX file in your Links panel. Even better: InDesign remembers the mapping even if the Word file link is updated, so you can set it and forget it! Notice how the Normal text is now formatted with the body style and Normal didn’t come in with the text to clutter up the Paragraph Styles panel (Figure 6).  That saves you the future step of deleting the Normal style. That’s great! But, there is some clean-up to do in the first few paragraphs of the document and all the other places where bold and italic were manually applied. InDesign sees all those things as local overrides. I could have manually applied the appropriate styles, but remember, I had 50+ documents with the same formatting, which would have taken forever. Instead, I used some automation, starting with Find/Change.

Create Find/Change Queries

The Find/Change feature of InDesign is one of my favorite tools. While many people use it only to find and replace a word here or there, it can do so much more! Check out this video about the awesome features of Find/Change. To open Find/Change, choose Edit > Find/Change (Command/Ctrl+F). For this task, you’re going to search for specific formatting and change it to the desired paragraph style, starting with the project name. Leave the Find What and Change To fields blank and navigate to the bottom half of the dialog box. In Find Format, click the search button to the right of the box (). Navigate to Basic Character Formats on the left and select Acumin Pro Condensed, Bold, and 18 pt. (You could also include the color, but I like to select as few options as possible to achieve the same outcome.) In Change Format, click the search button and choose the project name paragraph style (Figure 7).

Save this query by clicking the icon at the top right of the Find/Change dialog box next to the Query field (you don’t even have to click the Change or Change All buttons). Name it something memorable, like Word to project name (Figure 8). Note: The settings you select will stick, so to avoid confusing results in your next Find/Change, click the trashcan icons to clear them. Repeat this process for the remaining paragraph styles, saving each query as you go. The two character styles—bold and italic—need to be applied within the body style only (which you will apply when you place the files due to the style mapping). To create those queries, in Find Format, choose body from the Paragraph Style menu, navigate to Basic Character formats, and select Bold. In the Change Format, choose bold from the Character Style menu. Save your query. Repeat the process for italic. Now, you can run each query, all five of them, after placing your file(s) to automate your formatting! Fantastic, right? Almost… remember, if the Word files are modified and you update the links, all the formatting will go back to how it was in the Word document. While the queries speed up the process, I’m all about efficiency, so let me show you a handy script that will do even more work for you.

Use Multi-Find/Change

A simple Google search for Find/Change scripts in InDesign will result in a wealth of free options, but Multi-Find/Change by Automatication is my favorite and completely worth the low price if you find yourself repeating find/change queries. Many other users agree; Multi-Find/Change won the reader’s poll for Most Valuable Plug-in in Issue #137 of InDesign Magazine. What makes Multi-Find/Change so great is that it allows you to create sets of queries and run them in a sequence. In this case, you can make a new set called Project Sheets from Word and add the three paragraph style queries you saved earlier. Create a second set called Bold and Italic Character Styles (because it’s useful for lots of other projects) and add the two character style queries that you just made (Figure 9).

Now that you have developed your styles, saved a mapping preset, and created the Multi-Find/Change sets, you’re ready to put all the pieces together.

And Now for the Magic…

For my client’s project, I had a folder with five Word documents that I needed to place into my layout. Although Peter Kahrel has a great script to add them all at once in a single story, I wanted them to be individual, linked stories (because that’s how my client would update them) in this styled document, so I added them the old-fashioned way. Here’s how: Choose File > Place and select all five files. Be sure to hold down Shift as you click Open to get the Word Import Options dialog box. Choose the Normal to body preset (you can even set it as the Default to save some clicks later), and click OK. Repeat this step four more times with the other Word documents. Now, with your cursor loaded, place the text into the layout. Once added, note that Normal is in the body style, but the top few lines of each project are style overrides (as expected), as are the bold and italic characters throughout the body style text. All five Word files are in the Links panel, from your earlier preferences setting. Open the Multi-Find/Change panel from Window > Multi-Find/Change. (Better yet, add it to your workspace, so it’s always at your fingertips—you won’t regret it! See Issue #136 of InDesign Magazine for all the details on creating custom workspaces.) Choose the paragraph style set, make sure Document is selected from the menu for choosing the scope of the operation, and click Change All. Repeat for the character style set (Figure 10).

Done! And, because using the script is so easy, even if your Word files get updated, you can quickly update the links and then rerun the script to fix the formatting! These tricks aren’t just limited to files coming from Word. You can use the queries and script on any kind of text: typed, from other InDesign files, other text files, and so on. So, the only remaining question is… what will you do with all of the time you’ve saved?

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