Does anyone know a good way to export text to Word while maintaining
Bolds and Italics?

I know the obvious question is WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT? But I
think it makes sense.

Here is the work flow that I have been asked to help improve:
Designer gets original mechanical from many sources (other imprints,
other publishers, etc.)
Designer creates new mechanical for a variety of new formats that will
use cut down version of text in orig. mech.
Designer cuts and pastes text out of original InDesign (or Quark) into
Outlook, thus losing all styling.
Editors make changes and email text back, with styles applied, but
styles are lost once the designer cuts and pastes back into InDD.
Designer reapplies bold and italics based visually on the email.
Then they move to a series of paper corrections where the designer is
responsible for entering text changes.

InCopy is an obvious option, but that requires OT fonts, since we're
in a mixed PC/Mac environment. There are just far too many in use for
this to be a viable option.

I'd like the editors to work in Word, with styles and the designer to
keep the Word file linked, so that the editors are responsible for
entering the text corrections. Nether the original designer nor the
new one is using any styles!!! But this will change at least for the
new mechanical. So the first step would be to mark the bold and
italics before exporting.

When I export to RTF, too much formatting information is retained.
When I export to text, everything is lost.
What I'd really like is the equivalent of the shell CSS declaration
that you can get when exporting to epub.

I tried Dave Saunder's script, PreseveLocalFormatting, but it doesn't
work well the italic used is something like "Condensed No. 18
Oblique." I can't possibly amend the script to accommodate all the
possibilities.

I've seen PDF exports suggested, but I got the entire mechanical
recreated in word. It can get very sloppy.

I've used a work around for excel and Design Merge, where I have the
editors surround text that should be italicized with "++" and then use
GREP to style the text inbetween the markers as itals. So, if I could
script to surround bold and ital with markers before a text export,
that would work too.

Thanks for reading. I know it's long-winded. If anyone has any
suggestions, I'm all ears.

--
This list is a free service of LassoSoft: http://www.LassoSoft.com/
Search the list archives: http://www.ListSearch.com/InDesign/Browse/
Manage your subscription: http://www.ListSearch.com/InDesign/