The ability to map Microsoft Word text styles to InDesign styles is an incredibly important feature that many of us rely on to get our work done efficiently. And for the most part, the process works without a hitch. You can even customize the style mapping in the Import Options dialog box. But once in a while you might come across a glitch that prevents the mapping from working correctly. For example, here’s some text in Word that includes a figure reference formatted with a character style.
Here’s how the text is supposed to look when formatted with styles in InDesign. Note the slab serif font.
When the text is placed into InDesign, the Word styles can be mapped to their InDesign counterparts either manually, or automatically if they’re named identically.
But when the character style is applied, there’s a local override (the font from Word) that needs to be removed.
The source of the problem is the way the character style was defined in Word. No font was defined in the New Style/Modify Style dialog box.
Note that it doesn’t matter whether the Word style is based on the Default Paragraph Font or the Underlying Properties of the text. It also doesn’t matter whether the InDesign style specified a font or not. It seems like InDesign needs a specific font to map from, and if it’s not there there the font information is ignored during the mapping and just gets passed through.
So to prevent this problem make sure your Word character styles specify a font.
That way, InDesign can correctly map it to the font specified in your character style.
This article was last modified on July 23, 2021
This article was first published on October 24, 2019
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