Late last month, I wrote about paragraph styles in InDesign. Although at the beginning of that writing, I talked about how I convert marked-up copy with grep searches and why that needed to have standardized naming conventions for styles. When I finished that article, I realized I began by saying “when I first started doing layout” to introduce the marked-up copy concept, and never went into how I currently prefer receiving copy. That way? Word documents.
Marked-up copy has several things that can slow down conversion to layout. Just to name a few: authors have to manually insert [bold], [h2], and other tags; an author might not close the tag correctly, which will mess up your grep queries; an author might label things like the headings incorrectly.
A Word document seems to take care of all that.