I work with a lot of imported Word documents (they come from a variety of sources), and have just come up against a really odd issue – I was hoping someone might be able to give me a heads-up as to what’s happening. I’ve chanced on a workaround to the problem, but I don’t like knowing why the problem is happening, and would rather not use a workaround if at all possible.
Background: I’m running InDesign CS5.5 on a Mac with OSX 10.7.5
? I imported a Word.docx file, it flagged style conflicts, I set these to auto-rename and continued with the import.
? On import, a missing font (Droid) was flagged in ID. Going back to the Word file, the font’s not used at all, it was set in Time New Roman with a mix of styles and local overide styles applied. I hadn’t got the Droid font installed on my Mac.
? In ID, OK’ing or replacing the Droid font knocked a heap of formatting out of the document; oddly I lost Bold and Italics, superscripts and coloured text remained intact.
? After a lot of trial and error, (including installing Droid!), the styling still dropped out when I re-imported the Word file. The only workaround I found was to export the file out of Word as a .doc file format, not .docx. I don’t really want to alter the source file at all as it adds an element of risk in that I’m changing the file and it might change something which I don’t notice.
Does anyone have any idea what’s happening? I know Word and InDesign don’t play nice together! Unfortunately my client has to use Word, there’s no scope for them to use InCopy or similar.
Many thanks!
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