Integrating outside, self-formatting...

Hello all!

Let me give you some backgrounds:

I'm compiling a report for a group. It will be lengthy. Unfortunately, I already know that I will not be receiving all the support I need to assemble this report. Furthermore: due to lack of resource and time, I will most likely be the only individual with InDesign and knowledge of how to use it.

I need to integrate pieces that other people have written into this report. Rather than going through each and every piece and formatting them one, by one, by one... I was wondering if there was some way I could have the people submitting work ''code'' their documents so that InDesign could somehow recognize these codes and appropriately format them.

For example: In HTML, just as %26lt;b%26gt; signifies Bold is there some type of textual notation that people can place in their .doc or .txt document to have InDesign format specifically? I am not sure if such conveniences exist. Maybe there is something similar. Maybe there is nothing. I am very interested to hear of what may be available, if anything.

Thank you!

Integrating outside, self-formatting...

Good luck with that.

InDesign is capable of reading style tags in imported doc files, and of mapping to internal styles in your document (show import options when placing) and can even use external tags (either formatted correctly as InDesing Tagged Text, or using GREP to find and replace with styling) in plain text files, or XML, to automate formatting, but oout her in the real world we seldom see authors who are capable of holding up their end of the styling/tagging contract, so most long doc designers use scripts or individual Find/change queries to find formatted text they want to keep and assign a style to it, then remove any local overrides and assign a default paragraph style to everything else.

Integrating outside, self-formatting...

In other words, what is lacking are the people?

Sad but true!

Thank you!