greg_pasquali

I work in a cross-platform office where about half the staff works on PCs and half the staff works on Macs. We produce do***ents that are both text and graphics heavy, and that people have to be able to work on from both platforms. Our standard workflow is to develop the body of a do***ent in Microsoft Word, then link them into InDesign (most of us work in CS) for layout during final production.

One very common problem we have is that the black square bullet points from MS Word do***ents link into Indesign as a circle with a dot in the center, like a small target, rather than as a square bullet. Mac users then must replace these all manually with a different bullet (either from wingdings, which seems to be what MS Word uses to define its bullet glyph, or more commonly Zapf Dingbats / glyphs). This ONLY happens on the Apple machines, the PCs do not seem to have this problem. While seemingly minor, this becomes a significant problem when we are constantly passing a do***ent back and forth, or when the text is still under development in Word, so must regularly be updated, throwing away any updates to the bullets. In files with literally hundreds of bullets, this is completely impractical, and even just updating bullets at final layout can be a big nuisance.

I have been fooling around with character and paragraph styles, trying to define the bullet style in indesign as including a black square bullet, and not the circle with dot, but I cant even figure out where to begin, since Indesign seems to read the MS Word Bullet as a typed character that would have to be deleted anyhow. Is there a way to correct this in indesign? is it possible to search and replace all occurances of a symbol with a glyph?

bob levine

Have you considered InCopy for the editorial process? If not, I think
you should. It's far more reliable than a linked Word do***ent.

That said, are you using CS or CS2? CS2 had bullet styles built in and CS had that available with the PM plugins.

One more point...you should all be using OpenType fonts.

Bob

bob levine

Are you using styles properly in Word? If so, CS2 has excellent style
mapping. Just click the show import options when placing the Word do***ent.

As for InCopy, despite your comments, I'm going to repeat my
recommendation. It's a piece of cake to learn and you'll save all kinds
of time, which of course translates into all kinds of money.

Bob

greg_pasquali

Ahh, yes, and in regard to the comment about open type fonts, we have in fact switched the entire office to open type fonts (primarily gill sans and adobe garamond pro, among others) as our primary fonts for all work in order to streamline this process. This doesnt help with the bullet issue though, because its a problem of how MS Word defines bullets.

greg_pasquali

Thanks for your suggestion Bob, unfortunately, we the staff who do layout are only a few people in a much larger office, and since the majority of people in our office are familiar with and work in MS Office, it might not be a realistic alternative at this point. As well, often our clients want the word do***ent of our work products, both at draft stages and at the final stage, so the fact that pre-layout drafts need to be worked on by many people at the cities we work with and other consultants we work with, we need to stick to a more widely used format.

One additional detail, i realized i left out, is that in some cases (esp. in the very large do***ent Im currently working with) the bullet is replaced by the circle with dot in the middle as mentioned, often it seems to be an outlined box with an X in it. This symbol seems to pop up even with bullets that were originally defined in indesign by people working in PCs, though I believe this can be fixed by reminding people working on PCs to use the glyphs... however links from word are always the circle with a dot in the center.

johno

Seems like there was a way to define the bullets in the Word template you
are using. I haven't done that in a long time and don't recall how. Someone
at the MS word forum will have an answer.

-John O