Tutorials

Work with Word documents in InCopy CS2

by Adam Pratt and Mike Richman

You may find yourself needing to work with Microsoft® Word® files because stringers are writing their copy in Microsoft Word. Or, as is quite common, your newspaper may have an archive of obituaries of famous people that are updated when they are needed for publication, and you may be called upon to update one that was originally written in Word. It just got easier to work with Word documents in Adobe® InCopy® CS2. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the myriad options InCopy CS2 offers an editorial workflow that includes Word documents.

Open Microsoft Word documents

You can open Microsoft Word documents directly in InCopy CS2. Choose File > Open and navigate to the Word document you want to open; highlight it and click the Open button. Seems simple enough. But—gasp—while you’ve been minding your own business and expecting your Word document to pop open in the friendly confines of InCopy CS2, you’re suddenly faced with a huge dialog entitled Microsoft Word Import Options, with a seemingly baffling array of checkboxes, radio buttons, pull-down menus, and electrical wiring. Okay, there’s no electrical wiring, or at least no exposed electrical wiring. But there are a lot of options here (Figure 1).

Tip: The Microsoft Word Import Options dialog is a major new function in InCopy CS2. InCopy CS didn’t open Word documents directly. You could place Word documents, but not open them directly. Now you can.

Figure 1: The Word Import dialog may seem overwhelming at first, but it is loaded with powerful options for turning your Word document into exactly the InCopy CS2 document you’d like.

Stick with us. This isn’t that tough. The dialog is actually divided into three sections: Include, Options, and Formatting (note the headings and hairlines which group the sections together).

If you work in a textbook or academic publishing environment, the Include section of this dialog is rife with possibilities. The Word document you’re opening in InCopy probably already includes such things as a table of contents, index, footnotes, and endnotes. By default, the Word Import dialog checks all of these options, meaning that if they exist in the Word document, they’ll arrive intact in InCopy. Even better, you can pick and choose. Maybe you want the footnotes and endnotes, but not the table of contents text or the index text. Just remove the checkmarks next to the items you don’t want, and they will be left behind as your Word document makes its journey into an InCopy document (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Include section of the Word Import dialog lets you decide what parts of a Word document to import

When you want to include an existing table of contents or index from a Word document, check the appropriate boxes in this dialog. Note that the options are officially called ““table of contents text” and “index text.” This means that the Word document’s table of contents and index arrive in your InCopy document as plain text. The paragraph styles associated with a Word document’s table of contents, typically TOC1, TOC2, and so on, appear in InCopy’s Paragraph Styles palette. The page references in your original Word document remain in the InCopy document, but any of the styling that was applied in the Word table of contents will not. The assumption is that eventually these items will be styled in InDesign, by a designer.

Footnotes, as you would hope, are preserved, but are renumbered and formatted according to your current InCopy settings for footnotes.

Admittedly, we’re a bit baffled by the term “Options” to describe the second box, but nobody asked us. There’s only one option here, though it’s a helpful one. There are two types of curly quotation marks in the world: left quotation marks, which look like this:

“

and right quotation marks, which look like this:

”

Typically, those are also referred to as typographer’s quotes or smart quotes. The alternative is straight quotation marks, which look like this on both the left and right of a quote:

"

The option is whether your quotation marks should come in as typographer’s quotes or not. Most of the time, you’ll probably opt for the typographer’s quotes, but if your Word document uses straight quotes for inches and feet, you may want to turn this option off by deselecting the checkbox. If your Word document has a combination of straight and typographer’s quotes, deselecting the checkbox will leave the quotation formatting exactly as it was in your Word document.

The last and largest section of the Word Import dialog is called Formatting, and, if you’re going to be bringing a lot of Word documents into InCopy CS2, it’s well worth understanding (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The Formatting section of the Word Import dialog is where you choose how InCopy handles Word styles.

Suppose the person who originally wrote the Word document used all sorts of manual styling. He used a different font than your publication uses, italicized words that he thought important but you don’t, used the wrong type size, and even created new paragraph or character styles. The first radio button, Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables, tells InCopy to strip out all formatting and styles as it opens the Word document. That can save lots of work. It even removes the dreaded Normal paragraph style, which is created by default in a standard Word document. (Because it cannot be deleted from a Word document, Normal can cause designers grief in a workflow, either if several conflictingly styled Normals end up placed into a single InDesign document or if a production person has to track down unused styles at the end of the production cycle not knowing whether Normal has been inadvertently used at some point by a Word user.) If you opt to remove all the styles, you’re also presented with the option to preserve local overrides. That means that any character-level formatting such as bold or italic in the incoming Word document, either on a one-off basis or because it was assigned to a character style in Word, will be preserved. Beware, though, that if you opt to remove the styles and formatting, even if you choose to preserve local overrides, the attributes will remain, but any character styles will not be brought in with the document.

You can also strip out any formatting in a Word table at this point. “Convert tables to” gives you two options. The first is to convert existing Word tables to unformatted tables, stripping out not only font styling but also background colors, line colors, styles, and so on, to make the table as plain as possible to allow for styling it in InDesign. The alternative is to convert the table to tabbed text. Don’t rush to judgment. InCopy CS2 does some wonderful things with tables, things that are previously unheard of in a word-processing program, so you may want to keep the table as a table.

But maybe you want to retain the formatting of your original Word document. Or, quite conceivably, you want to retain some, but not all, of the formatting. InCopy lets you have your cake and eat it, too. You may choose to Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables. InCopy CS2 now has very robust support for bringing styles originating in Microsoft Word into InCopy CS2. If you opt to preserve, you are faced with three options in the Manual Page Breaks pull-down menu (Figure 4).

Figure 4: You have three options for handling the manual page breaks in your Word document as you open it in InCopy.

You can preserve manual page breaks, on the assumption that you’ll be replicating the layout of the Word document in InCopy, and thus ultimately in InDesign. You can convert them to column breaks, if that makes sense for your Word document. Or you can remove the breaks altogether by selecting No Breaks. Manual page breaks may be fine when the Word document is a standalone document, but when opening it in InCopy, with a final destination being an InDesign layout, most likely you want to remove them and let the designer handle it in InDesign.

You’re then faced with a series of checkboxes that allow for a great deal of control over which facets of an incoming Word document will be retained and which will be dispensed with. Import Inline Graphics does exactly that. If you check it, any inline graphic that was already in the Word document will become an inline graphic in your InCopy document. (This is new to InCopy CS2. In previous versions of InCopy, inline graphics that originated in Word didn’t show up in InCopy.) InCopy CS2 treats inline graphics from Word just as it does inline graphics created natively in InCopy, with one major exception: inline graphics from Word are embedded in the InCopy CS2 document, and there is no way to unembed them.

Tip: A word of caution: Inline graphics preserved from Word will show up named “fo” in InCopy’s Links palette (as well as InDesign’s, when eventually placed there). We’ve reported to Adobe that we’d prefer to have each inline named accordingly in the Links palette, but for the time being, beware.

Checking the Track Changes checkbox will bring into InCopy all the text edit changes that were tracked in the Word document. You’re then free to work your way through those edits as if they originated in InCopy.

Tip: But importing Word’s track changes doesn’t bring in many of the other attributes: Date, time, and name of the originator of the change do not appear in the converted InCopy document. Also beware that this is a one-way street. There is no way to save or export tracked changes created in InCopy back to a Word document.

Why would you import unused styles? It’s quite conceivable that the Word document began its life as a Word template, with a veritable plethora of styles, both character and paragraph, created specifically for your publication. All of them may eventually end up being used, but maybe not until the copy is placed into the InDesign CS2 document. Still, it might be best that the styles are retained all the way through the editorial process, even if they aren’t used until later in InDesign. We tend to leave this box checked so that the styles are available throughout the workflow.

Yes, we realize that this dialog has more options in it, but they are not relevant here. InCopy CS2, for better or worse, uses this same dialog for all interaction with Word documents, regardless of whether they’re being opened or placed into InCopy CS2. The options relating to style mapping, a powerful new feature in InCopy CS2, are only relevant when you are placing a Word document into an existing InCopy CS2 document.

After you’ve set everything according to your needs, it’s tempting to click OK, but there’s one more item to take a look at. If you’re going to be opening a number of Microsoft Word documents and will usually be using the same settings, you should save your choices as a preset. We looked at document presets earlier in this chapter. These presets are Word Import Presets. (We realize that you’re opening, not importing, the Word document at this point. Don’t worry about it.). Presets are a way of saving all those settings you just carefully made. You might create several presets, for a variety of situations, some that preserve the formatting, some that don’t; some that bring in footnotes, some that don’t. Trust us, over the long term, presets will save you time when opening Word documents. Click the Save Preset button and give your preset a name to help you remember what it does, such as Remove Formatting, and click OK to close and save the preset. Atop the Word Import dialog, the Preset pull-down menu will now have the name of your preset (Figure 5). Click OK again to finish opening your Word document.

Figure 5: The Presets pull-down atop the Word Import Options dialog.

You can create more Word Import Presets in this dialog by either opening a Word document in InCopy or placing one. So if you have the time and inclination, save the first preset, keep modifying your settings, and save as many presets as you like. When you’re done, all the presets you’ve created will be listed in the pull-down menu at the top of the Word Import dialog.

Tip: Word Import Presets are saved as .smp files inside the folder InCopy CS2/Presets/WordImportPresets.

InCopy’s default installation creates a Presets folder populated with the following folders: Autocorrect, Images, InCopy Shortcut Sets, Scripts, and Swatch Libraries. The Word Import Presets folder does not get created until you create your first Word Import Preset inside of InCopy CS2. You may, however, create the folder manually (spaces in the name must be there) and then populate it with .smp files. Do you have a series of these files you want to share with other InCopy CS2 users in your shop? You can copy them to the same directory on other users’ machines. These are XML files, making them fully cross-platform, meaning they can be copied from Windows machines to Macintosh computers and vice versa, allowing you to keep your shop consistent.

When you open a Word Document in InCopy CS2, it opens as Untitled. It doesn’t retain the name of your original Word document. That can be quite frustrating if you have to figure out the source of that text long after the fact.

Armed with a series of Word Import Presets, you may choose to set one as your default Word import preset. Make your choice from the pull-down menu atop the Word Import dialog and then click the Set As Default button. Next time you place a Word document, you can leave the Show Import Options box unchecked, and your default settings will be applied. If you open a Word document, you’ll still be taken to the Word Import dialog, but it will be prepopulated with your default preset.