5 Replies Latest reply: Sep 23, 2010 7:59 PM by squidz RSS

    Keep italics while styling text from Word

    squidz Community Member

      I have a long book with loads of endnotes. I've gotten them to come in with italics preserved. However, I still need to reset the styles for them. But any change kills all italics. Is there a way to re-style the text in general and preserve the existing italics? There are hundreds of these, so going back to touch every one is an evil undertaking.

        • 1. Re: Keep italics while styling text from Word
          P Spier CommunityMVP

          Sounds like the italics are local formatting. You can define an italics character style if you don't already have one and use find/change to find italic type and assign the style. There are even a couple of scripts floating around that will do this, along with bol, bold italic, underline, superscript and so forth. One of the best was written by Jongware, and you should be able to find it posted here somewhere if you dig a bit.

          • 2. Re: Keep italics while styling text from Word
            [Jongware] Community Member

            1. Create a character style named "Italics"; leave everything blank (so it inherits these values from the paragraph style) except the font style; set that to "Italic".

             

            2. Using regular Find/Change, make sure you have the "More Options" panel visible. Then make sure both the Find What and Change To text fields are completely and utterly empty. Click in the "Find Formatting" field, and select "Italic" for the Font style to search for. Click in the "Change Formatting" field, and select your "Italic" character style from the character style dropdown list.

             

            3. Make sure that the icons below the Find What field the one for "Footnotes" is checked (visibly pressed down), or all of your work is for naught.

             

            4. Hit the Change All button.

            • 3. Re: Keep italics while styling text from Word
              squidz Community Member

              Beautiful!

               

              That was perfect Jongware. Truly appreciate the super timely response during crunch time.

              • 4. Re: Keep italics while styling text from Word
                [Jongware] Community Member

                You're welcome

                 

                The script Peter mentioned can be found somewhere along this long thread -- the thread is long because I went to great lengths describing the circumstances when it does not work. Nevertheless, if you want to preserve not just italics, but also bold, italics, bold and italics, superscript, subscript, underlines, and small capitals, you might want to check it out.

                • 5. Re: Keep italics while styling text from Word
                  squidz Community Member

                  Will do. In this case, I just needed to maintain italicized titles within endnotes. All of the endnotes are being stripped from their sections of this book and compiled in their own section in the back. So, once I bring in the content, I'm free to move them around. The issue has always been that my client never quite follows the style rules they are given to make the process flow easier. They overlap styles, apply random fonts, etc which I have not been able to get InDesign to suck in and map correctly. So, while the endnote style I mapped is applied to all of them, they still have a bogus Times Roman font applied on top. When I option + click my style, it kills off the italics in the reference titles. Same happens for the endnote reference numbers sometimes.

                   

                  But, you're Find + Replace steps worked perfectly. I now know a little bit more about Find + Replace strategy. If I did more pubs of this sort, I would surely like to find ways to cut off all this issues at the pass. This pub occurs biennially so, the pain and proposed solutions fade between hits. All of the data in the pub, we have split out in Excel, which works great–tables, charts, graphs etc.

                   

                  This is number 4. If the fifth one is on the table in 2012, or any others that may occur, do you have any recommended reading that covers a solid process for handling 200+ pages of endnoted content from Word...besides relying on clients to actually follow the instruction provided to them?