Tutorials

Place Word documents into InCopy CS2 for ultimate control over styling and formatting

By Adam Pratt and Mike Richman

Your editorial workflow includes Adobe® InCopy® and Microsoft® Word documents. Should you open or place those Word documents into InCopy? Placing a Word document into an InCopy CS2 document can be advantageous when dealing with long Word documents. Another advantage to placing as opposed to opening is that InCopy CS2 now lets you exert even more control over styling and formatting that is already resident in the Word document than you have when opening a Word document in InCopy CS2. Choose File > Place in InCopy CS2, locate the Word document you plan to place, be sure to check the Show Import Options box, and then click Open. You’re faced with the Word Import dialog. Whereas this might scare other mortals, you realize the power harnessed in these options. It’s in the third section of the Word Import dialog that you’ll find options for resolving conflicts between incoming Word styles and those that already exist in your InCopy document
(Figure 1).

Figure 1: The bottom section of the Word Import dialog is where you can control incoming styles from a Word document into your InCopy CS2 document.

Loitering there in the Word Import dialog, just below the Import Unused Styles checkbox, is a report: As you’re placing your Word document into InCopy, in the background InCopy’s import filter has already done a quick analysis of the styles in both the Word document and your current InCopy CS2 document. If your incoming document has styles whose names are identical to those in the existing InCopy CS2 document, they can’t coexist in the same document. For example, let’s say that your Word document has a paragraph style called Heading 1. It is defined there in Word as Adobe Garamond® Pro, Bold, 36-point, left-aligned, and you place it into your InCopy CS2 document where there’s also a paragraph style called Heading 1, which is defined as Bickham Script Pro, Semibold, 48-point, right-aligned. Any text assigned to Heading 1 can’t have conflicting formatting. The process starts with the line in the Word Import dialog that says “Style Name Conflicts.” If that number is zero, and sometimes it is, you could say “Mission Accomplished” and declare an end to major style name conflicts as you place your Word document.

If you do have style name conflicts, though, InCopy puts a yellow warning icon in that line and tells you how many of the conflicts are with paragraph styles and how many are with character styles (Figure 1). Now you’ll need an exit strategy from the dialog, exercising a tremendous amount of control over how that styled text from Word arrives in the safe haven of your InCopy CS2 document.

You can opt for the Import Styles Automatically radio button (Figure 1) as one step toward resolving any conflicts. Adam and Mike are control freaks and admit it. Most of the time they avoid automatic settings because it means giving up control. Not in this case. Let’s go back to our example above. Heading 1 in the incoming Word document is Adobe Garamond Pro, Bold, 36-point, left-aligned, and Heading 1 in the InCopy CS2 document is Bickham Script Pro, Semibold, 48-point, right-aligned. Which should end up as the attributes of Heading 1 in the InCopy document? Use the pull-down menu for paragraph style conflicts (Figure 2), and you have complete control while letting InCopy CS2 do the heavy lifting. To resolve a conflict, your options are three.

Figure 2: Importing Styles Automatically? You can resolve conflicts with one of the three options in this section of the Word Import dialog.

If you opt to import styles automatically, the pull-down menu allows you to choose an automated solution for resolving style conflicts.

• Using InCopy Style Definition means that irrespective of the attributes of the identically named style in the Word document, the attributes of the InCopy CS2-defined style will emerge victorious. In our example, that means text coming in from Word that is tagged with the Heading 1 paragraph style will arrive in InCopy CS2 as Bickham Script Pro, Semibold, 48-point, right-aligned.
• Redefine InCopy Style means the attributes of the style in the Word document will be used to redefine the identically named style in the InCopy CS2 document. In our example, the text coming in from Word that is tagged Heading 1 will arrive in InCopy CS2 as Adobe Garamond Pro, Bold, 36-point, left-aligned. But beware, this can have sweeping effects on your InCopy CS2 document, because now you’ve redefined the style, so any previously existing text in your document which was assigned to the Heading 1 style is now going to be restyled as Adobe Garamond Pro, Bold, 36-point, left-aligned.
• Auto-rename brings coexistence to the conflict. Our two Heading 1 styles? They’ll coexist in our InCopy CS2 document. The Heading 1 style that was already in our InCopy CS2 document will remain there, unchanged, and all text that was styled with Heading 1 will remain intact, unchanged. Here’s the tricky part: the Heading 1 style from the Word document will be renamed, slightly, to Heading 1_wrd_1, and any text that was tagged with Heading 1 in Word will now be tagged with the newly named style Heading 1_wrd_1, and its attributes (Adobe Garamond Pro, Bold, 36-point, left-aligned) will remain.

Pretty good, don’t you think? We’ve brought an end to the conflicts exactly according to our strategy. Not only that, but the process for character styles is identical, yet separate. Meaning that it’s just as easy, but if you want paragraph styles set to redefine the InCopy style, but character styles set to use the InCopy style, you have that degree of control.

Unfortunately, even that won’t solve everyone’s style conflict issues. The Word document you began with may very well have Heading 1, Heading 2, and Normal, largely because that’s what Word offers up as defaults, but what if you’re placing it into an InCopy CS2 document that has Headline, Subhead, and Body Copy? They’re certainly not going to be resolved if you used Import Styles Automatically. You could finish placing the Word document and then hunt and peck your way through the process of finding every iteration of Heading 1 and change it to Headline, and so on, but don’t do that. Instead, select the Customize Style Import radio button (see Figure 1), click the Style Mapping button, and behold a way to control, on a style-by-style basis, how styles from a placed document map to their brethren in your InCopy document (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The new Style Mapping options in the Word Import dialog are tremendously powerful and allow you to control how incoming Word styles relate to existing InCopy styles on a style-by-style basis.

If InCopy detected style conflicts in the process of placing this Word file and warned you in the Word Import dialog, it’s repeated here at the bottom of the Style Mapping dialog, along with the scorecard reminding you of how many current style conflicts you have. The left-hand column lists the styles in the document you’re placing, and it takes that order from the order in which the source document lists them. The right-hand column lists the styles currently available in the InCopy document. The idea of mapping is to use InCopy CS2 to define a relationship between the styles in your incoming Word file and your InCopy document.

If, in fact, you have any style conflicts, InCopy will line them up so that you can find them easily. InCopy will put its current list of styles in the right-hand column in the same order as it found the incoming styles. It’s not going to be like those puzzles in the paper where you have to draw a line from the item in the left-hand column to the appropriate item in the right-hand column. The easiest solution here is to click the Auto-rename Conflicts button at the bottom. There’s no difference between that option and the one we delved into earlier, where we were offered Auto-rename separately for paragraph style conflicts and character style conflicts. Clicking Auto-rename Conflicts automatically renames all the incoming styles, both paragraph and character, just as in our previous example. The InCopy Style list, on the right, now revises all formerly conflicting style names as Auto-renamed. Problem solved. But remember that Adam and Mike want control—here is where we begin to exercise it. Back to our example. On the left, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3. Lined up next to each of those on the right, the New Paragraph Style pull-down menu. If you leave things alone, those three paragraph styles will each become a new paragraph style in the InCopy document. Click on the New Paragraph Style pull-down for a list of paragraph styles currently available in the InCopy document (Figure 4). If you click the pull-down menu next to Heading 1 and select the Headline style, you’ve now mapped Heading 1 from your incoming document to Headline in the InCopy document. You can roll right along from here and map Heading 2 to Subhead, and Heading 3 to Body Copy. Once you’ve made all your mapping decisions, click OK in the Style Mapping dialog, then OK in the Word Import dialog. Mission Accomplished!

Figure 4: If you click on [New Paragraph Style], InCopy offers the options of Auto-rename, Redefine InCopy Style, and a list of paragraph styles currently available in the InCopy document.

Tip: You do have the option of creating exceptions to your Auto-rename policy. Suppose you would like to take advantage of all the Auto-renaming InCopy has to offer, with the exception of Heading 1, where you’d rather retain the style attributes of Heading 1 as already defined in the InCopy document. After you’ve Auto-renamed everything, you can then locate Heading 1 in the left-hand column and click on the words Auto-rename in the right-hand column. You get a pull-down listing all the styles already in your InCopy document.