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• • March 13, 2015 at 9:24 am #73931
    Jo Holloway

    Member

    Hi everyone, I have “placed” a Word doc into my Indesign doc, and it imported the Times Roman text format. I don’t want to take all formatting out as there are a lot of italics in there. The paragraphs mark as “Normal+” but when I try to replace with “Normal”, the text turns red and some of it is struck out. I really don’t want to go through the whole book changing it all!

    How do I make changes to the InDesign doc without it turning red? Or do I have to go and change the whole Word file to the font I want? Surely there must be a setting in InDesign to stop the red and strike out effect? I have checked my “Normal” style settings and it’s definitely set to black.

    Thanks in advance! :)

  • March 13, 2015 at 10:28 am #73934
    Colleen Shannon

    Member

    Look at your Character Styles, that’s usually the culprit.

  • March 13, 2015 at 2:23 pm #73940
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Is the text actually red, or is it highlighed in red (pink)?

    As Colleen said–it could be a character style.

    Word is notorious for coming in like crap. That’s why I don’t import Word files. I have macros I wrote for my company that captures any local formatting (italic, bold, superior, small caps, etc.), and we run that and then saved as a text file to import.

  • March 23, 2015 at 9:38 am #74117
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    To add to dwayne’s thought, the pink highlight happens if you have a font missing, or just a particular style missing. For example if your word font is Meta Bold Small Caps and you have Meta, but not bold small caps, it will appear in pink even if the font looks correct. Try highlighting the text and seeing if the secondary dropdown below the font is blank, or shows a style [in brackets]. Change it to something that’s available and the pink highlight should go away.

    If you do edit –> find font you can replace individual missing fonts with working alternates, including all the missing italic fonts with actual italic fonts.

  • March 23, 2015 at 10:18 am #74119
    Jo Holloway

    Member

    Hi guys, so sorry I didn’t get right back to you. It wasn’t the pink highlight, it was the red character style – I just want to know why sometimes InDesign DOES these weird things (I presume it misreads a Word code, since the text is not red in the Word doc) – and why when I click on a paragraph style, it doesn’t simply put in the instruction from the style instead of being overridden by other codes? I think it’s a real failing. When one applies a paragraph style, THAT is what should happen. As it was, I had to do a workaround, blocking a bunch of text and then clicking on “None” in the Character Styles box.

    Thanks for the suggestions! Much appreciated. :)

    • March 23, 2015 at 3:42 pm #74130
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      ID definitely can get confused with Word files. That’s why I run macros to capture any local formatting and then save as a plain text file and import that way.

      So far as just clicking in a paragraph and selecting the paragraph style: ID is doing what you asked. If you place a word file into InDesign and tell it to bring in the local formatting from the Word file, then that’s what it does.

      And if character styles were used in the Word file, those will come through as well.

      One way to clear overrides is to hold down the option key and then click the paragraph style sheet. That will clear all local formatting, however.

      And—if there are character styles applied, you’d have to select the entire paragraph and click “none” as you did.

      Off topic—I have a good friend who’s name is Jo. People always ask her what her real name is (i.e., is Jo an abbreviation of Joanne or Josephine or something). She always says “No. My name is Jo. Just Jo.” That’s why her nickname is “Just Jo.”

    • March 31, 2015 at 9:30 am #74265
      Jo Holloway

      Member

      Thanks Dwayne; overriding all the formatting in our books would be a nightmare putting them all back in again, so that’s not on for us. We tried it. It’s fine for shorter documents but a book of 300 or more pages, not on. I need to keep the italics and bolds and headings; those are straight forward – but for InDesign to find something somewhere in Word that makes it decide that the text is red, and/or struck out … that’s just weird, and once the document is INTO InDesign, you should be able to apply a paragraph style and NOT have it mis-read codes from a programme as big in the world as Microsoft Word. We will have to agree to disagree; in my eyes, this is a major fault in InDesign. lol! But thanks for the input.

      Re the name: for my sins, my mother called me Josephine. Growing up, I was Josie. I’ve had various nicknames in my youth, unrelated to my real name, but then other people have also called me Joss, Josh, Jodie, Joey … I pretty much answer to anything with a J that sounds vaguely like Jo. :)

    • March 31, 2015 at 12:44 pm #74275
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      @Jo—Don’t get me wrong–I personally hate how InDesign works with Word. That’s why I have macros that capture all the local formatting in a Word file. Then I save it a .txt file and flow into InDesign that way.

      That sure was a lot of nicknames :)

  • March 31, 2015 at 11:44 am #74272
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Jo, take a look at this:
    https://creativepro.com/import-word-files-into-indesign-remove-local-formatting-but-keep-italics-and-bold.php

    Anne-Marie Concepcion also has an excellent course at lynda.com that talks about how best to work with Word files in InDesign.

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