13 Replies Latest reply: Dec 3, 2009 5:32 PM by mattaca RSS

    Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?

    mattaca Community Member

      I'm not exactly sure which forum this belongs on, so I'll start here.

       

      Our company does a lot of repurposing. We pickup recipes from a magazine and publish them in a book, or vice-versa. Our current system of picking up this content is inefficient and requires the text to be restyled every time it gets picked up. We're trying to implement a workflow that will retain the styling and eliminate duplication, but I'm encountering a couple problems:

       

      1) When pasting text from InDesign into a word doc, it retains the styles UNLESS those styles are pre-defined in word. For example, if the word template has a pre-defined style called Recipe - head and you paste text that has that style, the text will no longer have that style applied after pasting; it will be set to Normal.

       

      2) I can use InCopy to pickup the text and then export to RTF, but the text comes into Word with all the formatting applied (sizes, fonts, colors, etc.). This makes it very hard for the editors to read when they're reviewing the copy and making changes.

       

      So my questions are these:

       

      1) Is there a way to map styles from InDesign to Word? I'd like to set up the word doc to have all the styles names without the formatting so it's easier to read. OR,

       

      2) Is there a way to strip out all text formatting EXCEPT the style names themselves? We want it to retain the style names so we can map them to the InDesign styles when we import the text.

       

      If anyone has dealt with these issues, I would really appreciate the help. My searching thus far has yielded little in the way of results.

       

      Thanks in advance,
      Matthew

        • 1. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
          BobLevine CommunityMVP

          Roundtripping with Word is not an idea situation at all and copy/paste just makes it worse.

           

          Try to export your text as RTF instead and see if that helps, but InCopy would be a better solution.

           

          Bob

          • 2. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
            mattaca Community Member

            We plan to use InCopy in house, but we also have to send files to the copyeditor, proofreader, etc., so we need the option to put it in Word. I did try exporting to RTF, but like I said, it retains all the text formatting. I'm wondering if there's a way to just retain the applied style names, but not the styling. Thanks, though.

             

            Anyone else dealt with this?

            • 3. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
              BobLevine CommunityMVP

              Why's that?

               

              The remote InCopy workflow works very very well and a license for InCopy is certainly cheap enough when you consider how much time it saves.

               

              Bob

              • 4. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                mattaca Community Member

                If it were up to me, we would. But our editors are resistant to requiring the copyeditor and proofreader to use software they're not familiar with. Don't ask, that's just how it is. For this reason, I'm set on finding a solution using Word. Can you help along those lines?

                • 5. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                  BobLevine CommunityMVP

                  You can try exporting to InDesign tagged text.

                   

                  The other alternative is a commentable PDFs.

                   

                  Bob

                  • 6. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                    Joel Cherney Community Member

                    Because I have very few translators who can work in ID, I use a workflow like this all the time. If you're handy with VBA, you can write a script that

                    will go through all of the styles in your exported RTF and replace the formatting in the InDesign styles with something much simpler. For example, I'll change all serif styles to TNR and all sans styles to Arial, because I can assume that my less technically competent translators who panic when asked to install a font would at least have those two fonts installed. I can change the paragraph indents and spacing to something much simpler than what is in the ID doc with a single click. When I place that translated RTF back into InDesign, I can replace the translator's, ah, "formatting choices" with the original style definitions, so I can simply Clear Overrides and get something pretty close to the original formatting, only requiring minor cleanup.

                     

                    If you're not handy with VBA, and yet expect to use Word as an integral part of your workflow, I suggest that you get busy studying.

                     

                     

                     

                     

                     

                    Edit: Actually, tagged text is a pretty good idea, if you're willing to do some post-processing. The kind of editor who insists on unstyled text in Word is unlikely to be willing to edit tagged text in a raw text editor (or to use TagEditor or some other tool intended for manipulating tagged text).

                     

                    Message was edited by: Joel Cherney

                    • 7. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                      RodneyA Community Member

                      Couldn't you create a Word document that has the same style names as your Indesign style names, but defined with simpler formatting (Times, Arial, etc.)? Export from Indesign as rtf, then open the rtf file in Word, then import the alternate styles from the alternate styles document. When you bring the edited file back into Indesign, it should reassert its own style definitions, as long as the style names remain the same.

                       

                      Mind you, I haven't actually tried this, but it seems worth a shot. Your experience of styles being renamed to "Normal" in Word worries me a bit. Word version 5 had an excellent implementation of styles, and it's gone seriously downhill ever since.

                      • 8. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                        BobLevine CommunityMVP

                        Don't blame the hammer, blame the carpenter.

                         

                        Bob

                        • 9. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                          mattaca Community Member

                          Or, blame the company that made the hammer if it's not constructed well enough to do something as simple as hitting nails.

                          • 10. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                            mattaca Community Member

                            Thanks, Joel and Rodney for those suggestions. I'll try importing more normal looking styles into my Word doc (I assume you can override?) and see if that helps. If it doesn't I'll get busy learning VBA. I'll let you know what I work out.

                            • 11. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                              BobLevine CommunityMVP

                              Of course, but that's not true in this case. You're trying to use the back of a wrench instead of a hammer.

                               

                              And the bottom line is this. If those editors can't handle this with a simple RTF export and just edit the text and return it then the argument against InCopy goes out the window...because apparently they don't know how to use Word, either.

                               

                              Bob

                              • 12. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                                mattaca Community Member

                                Just to report to back, here is what I ended up doing. I created a Word document with styles that matched in name only—just the default formatting, and based them on No Style. I exported my InDesign document to an RTF file, then opened my blank Word document and chose "Insert File." I made sure I did place the file as a link and the style names were retained but the formatting matched the Word file. This allowed me to later pull the text back in to InDesign and map the styles to have them automatically formatted.

                                 

                                There IS an option in Word under Format > Style > Organizer that allows you to transfer styles from one document to another, but there are no presets and it always comes up with the default setup of exporting the styles. Changing that is kind of a pain, so I found the above solution to be the simplest method.


                                Hope this helps someone else who has repurposing needs in the future.

                                • 13. Re: Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?
                                  mattaca Community Member

                                  mattaca wrote:


                                  I made sure I did place the file as a link

                                   

                                  Whoops! That was supposed to read did NOT place the file as a link. Big difference.