Roundtripping text between Indesign and Word?

Question

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

Answer 1

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