IDCS3- Importing Word Body Text: Best Approach?

Question

Hi all, first post here. Am relatively new to the wonders of InDesign in my new occupation, and during the current quiet period have decided to look at some areas of our DTP department and how our lives could be made easier.
Currently we receive the bulk of our body text as Word documents, which we import to InDesign. Our templates are very rigid and rarely deviate from one report to another, so I've been looking into a script or alternative method of painstakingly copying, pasting and changing paragraph styles in ID. I've looked into XML, basic VB scripts but can't help but wonder whether doctoring the original Word docs at source would be easier?
Thanks in advance, all feedback appreciated.

Answer 1

I take a "bulk" approach to cleaning up and formatting Word files. The
more I can work with at one time, the more efficient I am, because
finding and replacing 100 items takes about the same amount of time as
finding and replacing 10 items.
So if I were working with inserts, I would want to Place all the inserts
in one big Indesign file; lock down all the character formatting with
character styles (by searching for superscript, replacing with a
superscript character style, searching for italic, replacing with an
italic character style etc.); search for clues in the Word files and
apply paragraph styles (search for bullets, replace with a bulleted list
style; search for left/right indents, replace with an extract style,
etc.); clean out all the double spaces, extra tabs, returns, and other
junk; standardize dashes, quotes, and ellipses; and select all, remove
overrides.
Some of this can be automated with scripts. Some of it has to be
customized based on the particular weird mangle that particular weird
author made to the Word file. A lot of it can be speeded up just by
saving Find/Replaces.
Then copy/paste, same as you've been doing.
Any other efficiency improvements are going to have to involve your
authors, most of whom (at least in my experience) are doggedly resistant
to efficiency, often preferring their bibliographies and indexes to
contain thousands of carefully placed returns, spaces, and tabs instead
of a simple hanging indent setting.
But if they were, by some miracle, open to trying something different,
you might make them some Word templates, tell them to use consistent
styles (and to limit themselves to those styles). Another option is
InCopy, which would let your authors bypass Word entirely and end your
copy/paste business.
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com