Summary

Because today's word processors are so powerful, there's a temptation to do a lot of sophisticated, layout-oriented formatting in them before bringing the files into a layout program like InDesign. But don't. No word processor has the typographic or layout ability of InDesign, and doing a lot of work in your word processing file is simply a waste of time you'd need to do it over again in InDesign in the context of your layout anyhow.

Focus on the meaning-oriented formatting in your word processor: use of style sheets to indicate headlines, bylines, quotation blocks, and so on, as well as local formatting like italics, superscripts, and font changes.

When you're done preparing your text, be sure to save it in a format compatible with InDesign. Even if your word processor format is not compatible with InDesign, chances are it can save in one that is.

Finally, consider using the Tagged Text format to specify sophisticated formatting, such as defining paragraph and character styles in InDesign, in your word processor. This requires a familiarity with programming or coding in formats like HTML but can be a powerful way to add formatting for highly predictable, structured documents in your word processor before importing the file into InDesign. Using it just to specify paragraph and style sheets is a great way to bring database-oriented data, such as catalogs, into an InDesign template.