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I have recently dumped the text for a book across to a colleage to 'lay up' in InDesign (CS2) on a G3 iMac. Underlining of words was fine but neither bold or italics went across to the extent I was being hassled to use Word or at least dump everything into Word before giving it to them.

I used Word to import a chapter from Nisus and bolding and italics went into Word OK. This chapter was then sent to InDesign and the formatting was retained.

I know Dave has previously mentioned that what we do with text after it leaves Nisus is our responsibility, but can Nisus people have a look at this. The underlining formatting is fine so maybe bolding and italics just need tweaking so these don't drop out once dumped into a desktop publishing package. I'm using Nisus 2.7. Thanks.

It sounds like yet another problem with InDesign's RTF import facility. You say your document goes into Word fine, so try saving the document as RTF from Word and giving that to InDesign. Do bold and italics still disappear? If so it's an InDesign problem and they need to fix it.

I agree that NWE and InDesign still have a few issues – on which I've repeatedly harped in previous posts – but until they are resolved (regardless of whether the responsibility lies with Nisus or Adobe) there are a few useful workarounds which I've found work reasonably well.

For the record: I typeset books, mostly novels, professionally for a number of publishers in Sweden. Some of these I've also translated. I use the same set of styles/formats in both programmes (which does mean that I have to reformat other people's files, yes, but that's something I've always had to do …).

In order to get the italics to "come along" into ID, try this. When the NWE file is ready to go, create a character style called for instance "Italic", select all the italics (in the way often described in this forum – so I won't do it again) and apply this character style to them. Even if the italics aren't imported into ID, the character style is, and can then be suitably defined as italic in ID.

Incidentally, in this way I can also circumvent NWE's lack of support for Small Caps. Create a character style callad, for example "Small Caps", apply it to everything that's supposed to be Small Caps, and define it accordingly once it's in ID.

There's some other formating that tends to come with the the placed NWE text, which shouldn't, and my workaround here is to simply find and replace each style with itself, and that usually takes care of it. Clunky, yes, and takes about ten minutes extra, once the text is in place, but it does make NWE a viable word processor for me and the work I'm doing.

Hope these tips can help somebody else, too.

Cheers,

Peder

PS Your colleague is running ID CS2 on a G3 iMac? I thought my G4 550 mHz PowerBook sagged under the load of CS, and now I'm sitting with a 24 inch, 2.33 gHz Intel iMac, waiting for CS3

Wow, Peder, those are some really useful tips. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks to dshan and Peder for your suggestions.

dshan: I tried your suggestion i.e. copy from Nisus into Word and then save the Word document as an RTF and then dump that into InDesign. None of the formatting went across (with Nisus at least the underlining did) so on that small sample, it seems that InDesign is not very good at importing RTF documents, certainly not the formatting. So it seems to be a problem with InDesign.

Peder: You're a bit more up to speed than I am but I'll try your technique later when time allows. Thanks.

Bryan and Ryan: Glad I could be of some service

This rtf thing seems to be a bit of a morass. I'm surprised the formatting in Word didn't come across into InDesign. For a long time I persisted with Word 5.1. Worked seamlessly with PageMaker, but ID refused to import that format, so the solution (until NWE reached that viable state) was to save as rtf and place in InDesign, and then all the formatting was preserved, just like with PageMaker. But the time then came to move away from Word, PageMaker and Classic...

The Nisus people I've been in touch with claim that NWE produces absolutely standard rtf, so italics, etc should come along... But like I said, there are workarounds. And of course, the same technique can be used for any conceivable kind of formatting.

To paraphrase a former US President: "It's the name, stupid!"

Cheers and good luck!

Peder

Yes, it's very frustrating when a smaller company (i.e. Nisus) puts out standard-formatted documents (i.e. RTF), but it doesn't work the same way as the messed-up variations of the big boys (Microsoft and Adobe) do.

This is quite similar to the way I want to code websites in beautiful standards-based XHTML and CSS, but eventually I have to get all pragmatic and make it work in the gnarled monster that is Internet Explorer. *shudder*