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• • March 23, 2016 at 9:04 am #83276
    RWVVV

    Member

    Hey all,

    Today I started on a project and I received an utmost horribly styled Word document that needs to be put in Indesign. Really, the stuff that happens in that doc, amazing….Para’s indent for no clear reason, list styles without numbers or bullets, horrible anchored images. Well I could go on about it…

    I used this very nice instruction to clear out about 60 unused styles (whoa!):
    https://creativepro.com/strip-the-crud-from-word-files-before-you-map-styles.php

    Afterwards I started mapping styles, but here’s the thing: the destination styles are not visible as such in the document. I am still looking at Arial all over, basically what I see in the source doc, so not my own styles. This is because all the para styles are overridden, like, local-formatting-overridden. This is exceptionally odd, since the source doc has not so much local formatting really. They did apply styles in Word. So how do I fix this?

    I would not want to select all and clear overrides, because this also strips some stuff I’d like to keep for now.

  • March 23, 2016 at 4:19 pm #83320
    Ari Singer

    Member

    Funny! I just had the same exact problem a few days ago.

    So this is what I did:

    First, of course, I mapped all the Word styles to their InDesign counterpart. Then when I placed it, I had a mess of fonts and sizes (even worse than your Arial…). So this is what I did:

    I knew that the only local overrides that I want to retain are Bold and Italic. So I quickly did a Find/Change to Find Format: Bold, and Change Format: ‘Bold’ character style. Then I did the same with italics to my ‘Italics’ character style. (I have these two Find/Change queries saved already, so it takes a second to run).

    Then when this is done, I select all the text in the frame (Ctrl+A) and hit the ‘Clear Overrides in Selection’ button on the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. And wallah! everything was just the way it was supposed to be!

    P.S. If you have more local overrides that you want to retain (such as Underline etc.) just do a Find/Change query for that as well.

    Hope this helps.

  • March 29, 2016 at 3:18 am #83439
    RWVVV

    Member

    Clever!

    Thanks, I will apply this strategy.

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