Make Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign Get Along

Pariah Burke

This article is excerpted from the April/May 2010 issue of InDesign Magazine (#34). Subscribe to InDesign Magazine.
Microsoft Word is the de facto standard word processor. That means that the majority of the text for our layouts arrives in the form of Word documents. Ugh!
Still, with a little knowledge and a decent strategy, importing and styling copy from Word needn’t be arduous or tedious. I’ll show you how to be productive despite the software.
In this article’s first section, “Getting the Best Import,” I’ll help you get a Word text import that maximizes compatibility with your InDesign document and minimizes your manual cleanup.
The second, section, “Cleaning Up a Placed Word File,” solves problems like two hyphens instead of an em dash, spaces immediately before a carriage return, tabs instead of paragraph indents, and much more.
To read the whole article as a PDF, click on the image below.