Formatting in a Flash

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This article appeared in Issue 2 of CreativePro Magazine.

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.

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