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• • January 26, 2023 at 1:33 pm #14385756
    David Peattie

    Member

    I’ve had this problem for a long time now, but made an interesting discovery this morning that I wanted to share.

    Problem: When importing Word documents (.doc, .docx, or .rtf) into InDesign, words that contained special diacritics such as “í” (accented lowercase i) and were formatted as italic, the í would come in roman. The Word document shows the entire word formatted as italic.

    [Import options selected: “Remove styles and formatting” with “preserve local overrides” checked.]

    A friend suggested that I apply a character style (called “italic”) with italics as its only attribute to the word. I explained that I didn’t want to import with “Preserve styles…” selected because I didn’t want all the garbage styles in my InDesign document. But I tried it and added that style to the word and it worked, even though I was still importing with the “remove styles” option selected! The word imported with the “italic” character style applied!

    I’m glad that there’s a solution, but it shouldn’t have worked. I’m assuming I’m missing something. Has anyone encountered this and doesn’t anyone have an explanation?

    There’s probably a simple way for me to share screen shots, but I’ve not figured it out.

  • January 26, 2023 at 2:07 pm #14385763
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    OK, wow, this is pretty strange. I just tested this myself and got something similar but even more weird than you.

    I made a Word doc with this text:
    This is a test of some téxt in Word that I will be ímporting into InDesign.

    (So the e and the i have accents… I hope those are retained here on this forum.)

    When I import into ID, the “téxt” works properly, but the second word comes in as a missing font! The whole word is set to: [Times New Roman (Body CS)]
    That is really weird because the font is set to Georgia in InDesign! So where does that Times New Roman come from… and why “Body CS”?

    My theory is that some accents are not natively encoded in the font (like the lower case i with an accent) and Word saves it with some crazy font substitute.

    However, when I apply the Emphasis character style in Word and try that, it still does not work. I’m not sure why it is working for you.

    As for screen shots… unfortunately we have no way to upload images here, but you can put them in a shared folder (such as dropbox or Imgur and share the link here.

    • January 26, 2023 at 3:12 pm #14385764
      David Peattie

      Member

      In my case the Word font is Times New Roman (which you’d think would not have some weird encoding).

      I tried creating my own accented “í” by the Mac method of option-e then i, which I’d assume is appropriate, but it has the same problem.

      David, did you try duplicating the character style approach, and if so, did the character style come through even when the “remove styles” option was selected?

      oh, and chirp chirp! (Pomona ’84)

    • January 27, 2023 at 8:39 am #14385790
      David Blatner

      Keymaster

      Cecil?! Is that YOU?! Chirp! Sadly, I didn’t walk through the gates until the autumn of ’84.

      I did try duplicating the character style approach. When I set it to “Remove Styles” in Import Options, the character style (and paragraph style) is stripped away and I’m left with local formatting… which looks the same (that is, I get the dreaded pink highlighting that this font doesn’t exist)

  • January 27, 2023 at 12:30 am #14385767
    Steve Davis

    Participant

    I experience this often when people send me text in Hebrew, typed in Word using typefaces that don’t support all the diacritics (accents, etc.)… I use PrefectPrep text https://creativepro.com/perfectpreptext-a-smart-way-to-style-local-formatting/

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