Reply To: MS Word to InDesign best practices for novels

I agree with David about not copying and pasting, but instead using the “place” feature. So far as the other stuff:

Unless there are scripts out there, I don’t know if you can automate some of the stuff you want.

Your InDesign paragraph style sheet can control whether a chapter starts a new page or an odd page. That has to be done in InDesign. But you need a separate master page and you can’t tell Word how to do that. You have to apply the master page in InDesign.

You InDesign paragraph style sheet can add the drop cap, but that has to be done in InDesign.

For blank pages—you have to do that it in InDesign.

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In my workflow—I run macros to capture the italic, bold, small caps, superiors, etc.

Then I search and replace on the Word paragraph style sheets and have my InDesign paragraph style tag put into place.

Then I save as a .txt file and import via xTags.

xTags could do what you want so far as chapters starting new rights and the appropriate master page, but it’s expensive and requires a lot of tagging ahead of time.

Sounds to me like you want a magic way to automatically flow into Indesign with an “Easy” button or something. Please don’t take that the wrong way. But Word is a word processing program, and InDesign is for page layout. It’s not so simple to automate. There’s always a lot of work involved.

Maybe some script writers will chime in if they know of scripts to make things easier.