Reply To: MS Word to InDesign best practices for novels

Sean

You can definitely capture the styles in Word (and the italic and bold and stuff). But not capturing new rights or blanks and stuff like that). Basically–you can import the basics into InDesign. You can import the paragraph and character styles, but that’s about as far as it goes.

You will still write your InDesign style sheets so they come in correctly. And the InDesign paragraph style sheets will have the stuff like chapters start odd pages, or drop caps for the first paragraph. But that has to be written into the InDesign style sheets–not the Word ones. I don’t know of a way to create blanks via Word.

And besides–your layout in Word will not match InDesign’s layout.

I personally wrote macros and use xTags (and save Word files as .txt files). I rarely import regular Word files as I find they are more trouble than they are worth, and macros can clean up that stuff in Word saves more time than trying to fix afterwards in InDesign.

Good luck–If you’re mainly doing novels, then definitely set up a template in InDesign. And use the same style sheet names in both Word and InDesign. It should map properly. But be careful of ellipses coming in wrong, or single/double quote combinations which can come in screwed up. But it’s stuff you will see and get used to (which you can fix via search and replaces) (or a macro).

But basically–you want the Word paragraph and character styles to match your InDesign paragraph and character styles. But–your InDesign styles are the rule that is followed. When you import, you want InDesign’s styles to be used–not Word’s. So set up you InDesign styles for what you want and ignore Word’s styles. The important thing is they have the same name and the Word file flows in using InDesign’s styles (not vice versa).

I am probably rambling.