When used to good measure, MS Word still is a fine piece of an all-purpose word processor. The vast majority of professional writers still prefer authoring and editing their copy with MS Word (Google Docs is no different). Moreover, clients, publishers and authors, would be better assured that no conversion errors unintentionally arise during the back-and-forth, requiring them to do less proof-reading and enjoy a speedier production process. In the end, I could bill my clients less job work, as well. That way, I not only would enjoy a much more agreeable life as a designer, as I could spend my time more proficiently, could focus on the things that matter, rather than managing file formats. If it were entirely for me to decide, 6 I would ditch Word from the workflow altogether and force all collaborators and team-members on a project to work with plain text files 7 exclusively. Not to mention such a workflow surely doesn’t scale or can profit by automation. With each round of corrections, or iteration of copy edits made on the original Word document, the overhead costs are multiplied. It not only is an error-prone process, but one which can quickly grow into an expensive workflow, too. (Authors surely don’t like the DTP-er takes on the role of an editor.) 5 InDesign’s Style Mapping dialog box requires manual clean-up of messy Word styles. docx tag soup bubbles up, forcing the designer to weed out duplicate and redundant styles, using “Customized Style Import” and the “Style Mapping” dialog box, at the peril of misinterpreting the author’s intention. Then the heterogenous cruft and clutter of. The hidden defects of sloppy markup generated as the debris of graphical live preview text editing, become apparent as soon as the Word file is placed in InDesign. ![]() ![]() Most users apply visual inline styling instead, resulting in unusable markup. Few authors use Word’s styles to sensibly format and structure their documents. Direct, inline styling devastates the integrity of a document’s intended semantical structure, and cripples its portability: without serious manual effort and clean-up, the document may never be sufficiently exported to other file formats, be published on the Web, or put into print. While on the screen, or printing directly from Word, the document may surely look how the author thinks it should, under the hood it’s become a markup mess. Rather than immediately structuring its meaning, they visually pimp the looks of their texts, as a poor proxy for the intent they want to confer - poor indeed, usually both as regards the underlying markup, as from a graphic design perspective. Instead, people are doing all sorts of weird stuff while playing around with Word’s wysiwyg 4 click-a-button tricks (bold, italics, tabs, indentation, font sizes, colors, “word art”). Indeed, few Word users know of its styles (header, subheading, emphasis, etc.) - let alone they apply them consistently. In practice, however, it can become all very cumbersome, because InDesign’s linked file placement workflow assumes that the original document has been correctly formatted to start with. But when it does, you can leave it over to InDesign to do the heavy-lifting of converting any markup it finds in the original document (like Word styles) to the paragraph and character styles you have prepared in your InDesign document. This is important because importing plain text from a file is child’s play, while preserving local formatting and styles of “rich text”, requires that InDesign is aware of the external file’s document format, its domain, model or schema, and knows how to convert its markup. InDesign happily supports various text import formats, including MS Word’s. ![]() Then, the linked file will appear in the Links panel, whence it can be easily updated 1 - very much like you would do with linked graphical assets, like external. This means the import is done only once, and any edits made to the external document thereafter (from within Word), will not drag over to InDesign, unless you explicitly select the link option in the File Handling preferences. ![]() By default, text placed in InDesign is not linked to the original document’s content, but embedded. Using File > Place, it should be a straightforward process - theoretically. If you’ve ever imported MS Word documents into InDesign, you know how troublesome that can be at times. Markdown to InDesign From Word to Markdown to InDesignįully automated typesetting Word to InDesign
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