I’d personally keep it one document.

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.

I know lot of folks use and like the book feature in Indesign. I also think it’s a great feature, as I hate having one huge document.

But many of the big publishers don’t want us to use the book feature. They want and insist on a single large document (all text threaded).

This makes it a royal pain in the butt when they outsource to someone else and only chapters are threaded (so we have to rethread the entire document). Or when we are given 20 files and have to make them into one.

And they insist ONE document.

Even worse is when they buy the rights to a book (either done in Spain, UK, Australia, or somewhere) and there are no style sheets written or master pages (i.e., all running heads done by hand). We have to recreate the files and write the style sheets and make master pages. And make one document.

And all this has to be done in two days.

Sorry for ranting.

Try clicking on the second chapter opener and uncheck the section start.

Jim

I’m glad you got it figured out. I was thinking this morning that the character style must have been applied somewhere else, and thus canceling out the running heads.

Sometimes it’s good to step back or look at something later when your mind is fresh.

Glad you got it figured out.

Jim–you’re probably right–do the manual thing (unless it’s going eBook later on–as it’s a no-no for that thing).

Not sure why InDesign is behaving this way. It sounds like it’s been set up correctly.

I’m at a loss at this time.

Well–what happens is we have our InDesign files converted to eBooks by the publishers. Which is a pain because they expect us to set up the jobs like it’s an eBook even though we’re in print. Can’t use soft returns anywhere in the job, each and every item must have a style sheet (can’t add space above a paragraph manually–but instead must create a style with the space above).

Heck–there were complaints because I used a rule of “none” above heads so they’d automatically sink at the top of the page for even lines. And on copyright pages, we can’t have space after in the style sheet as it may cause a blank page.

It’s freaking nuts.