![]() ![]() ![]() Rather than immediately structuring its meaning, they visually pimp the looks of their texts, as a poor proxy for the intent they want to confer - poor indeed, usually both as regards the underlying markup, as from a graphic design perspective. While on the screen, or printing directly from Word, the document may surely look how the author thinks it should, under the hood it’s become a markup mess. Direct, inline styling devastates the integrity of a document’s intended semantical structure, and cripples its portability: without serious manual effort and clean-up, the document may never be sufficiently exported to other file formats, be published on the Web, or put into print. Few authors use Word’s styles to sensibly format and structure their documents. Most users apply visual inline styling instead, resulting in unusable markup. The hidden defects of sloppy markup generated as the debris of graphical live preview text editing, become apparent as soon as the Word file is placed in InDesign. Then the heterogenous cruft and clutter of. docx tag soup bubbles up, forcing the designer to weed out duplicate and redundant styles, using “Customized Style Import” and the “Style Mapping” dialog box, at the peril of misinterpreting the author’s intention. (Authors surely don’t like the DTP-er takes on the role of an editor.) 5 InDesign’s Style Mapping dialog box requires manual clean-up of messy Word styles. It not only is an error-prone process, but one which can quickly grow into an expensive workflow, too. With each round of corrections, or iteration of copy edits made on the original Word document, the overhead costs are multiplied. Not to mention such a workflow surely doesn’t scale or can profit by automation. If it were entirely for me to decide, 6 I would ditch Word from the workflow altogether and force all collaborators and team-members on a project to work with plain text files 7 exclusively. That way, I not only would enjoy a much more agreeable life as a designer, as I could spend my time more proficiently, could focus on the things that matter, rather than managing file formats. In the end, I could bill my clients less job work, as well. Moreover, clients, publishers and authors, would be better assured that no conversion errors unintentionally arise during the back-and-forth, requiring them to do less proof-reading and enjoy a speedier production process. The vast majority of professional writers still prefer authoring and editing their copy with MS Word (Google Docs is no different). When used to good measure, MS Word still is a fine piece of an all-purpose word processor. It all depends on the scale and complexity of a project, but quite frankly, when you don’t get plain text files from the client, it is oftentimes more efficient to just copy-paste a raw, unformatted dump of text into an InDesign text frame, and then manually re-apply those few italicized charstrings manually using your character styles. It’s the pragmatical thing to do for small-scale, one-off page layout projects. ![]()
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