Dear Michel, I’m curious too.

Gert, thank you for sharing your workflow with us. We recently welcomed an intern at our graphic design studio, who had basic knowledge of programming and was familiar with macros in Word. We also settled down for a macro to assign styles in Word. We decided to use visual styles, for example colours, so that we can use these visual marks for proofreading. With this visual solution, of course the macro might miss something, you can easily spot italics in the original document if you need to check if all italics transefered well into InDesign.

I find it surprising that in 2012 a professional application can't garantee to import all text styling. Looking back, I can't seem to remember that Quark XPress ever missed italics or footnotes when importing text from Word. The options were very basic but it did the job. Of course, dealing with footnotes in the app was more complex but this is another topic.

I fine-tuned my tests and noticed that only isolated all italic words don't make it into InDesign:

First of all, the same problem applies to bold as well.

1. Group of words in italic, on one line (paragraph), only italic, no spaces or glyphs in roman, result: no italic imported

2. Same group of words in italic , within a roman paragraph, result: italic is imported

3. case 1 with a space or one letter in roman, result: italic is imported

I sent a bug report to Adobe.

Since the Import Word Styles option seems to keep all the italic + bold formtatting, I'll stick to that import option, even though it means more cleaning after importing many Word documents from various sources…

@ Jongware: I've downloaded your “preptext” script, very useful thanks. Someone on the Adobe InDesign forum posted the link during discussions for the same italic problem I'm reporting here.

When you receive 300 Word documents, is that a solution ;-)

Thanks for your answers. I guess, as a Quark user, I couldn't help but notice this omission. As you probably remember, this option was available in Quark Xpress. Anyway, there isn't a perfect application.

Now, I'll report this to Adobe.

Thank you for your quick answer. I checked your tools' features at DTPtools and I missed “replace colors in styles”, sorry. I've asked about the CS5 version availability and am waiting for a release candidate Mac version. Hopeyfully I'll be able to fix this in just a few clicks, great!

Jongware: Thank you for this start, I'll give it a go soon.

1. What I mean by working on the content of the book is more about how many pages per section, getting an overview of the whole. My client in this case is an institution with a collection of very rare books, I'll have a look if I find Lilliputians behind the shelves. The page size I'm printing my thumbnails on is A3. The thumb size is big enough to read a section name and page number.

2. Being able to apply colours to the Masters is something I've asked Quark for years and recently suggested in an InDesign wishlist to Adobe. I'm still amazed that this function wasn't part of a previous version. When you work on a 200 pages documents, it has to be visual to help you get an easy view of the structure of your document. To me the Print thumbnails option is in the same category, so I was expecting the labels to be displayed.
As for scripting, I've done a bit in Python when working on typefaces in FontLab Studio but I'm not familiar with InDesign scripting at all, unfortunately. I should have a look and thanks for pointing out this option.