PeopleCert · Official Book Automation · Dinno 0.7.0 · 7 September 2026

From Word to InDesign: a measured typesetting pipeline

This document answers two questions. What did we gain — with every claim tied to a measurement. And how do you use it — what you prepare, what you press, and what the designer finishes in InDesign. The reference book is ITIL Experience Official Book EN v5.1: 363 Word pages, 6,610 paragraphs, 162 tables, 234 inline pictures.

Summary

Today the Official Book is typeset by hand: content is copied out of Word, styles are applied by hand in the InDesign template, and tables and figures are rebuilt. The request says so in its own words:

"tables, objects, and figures do not transfer reliably and must be recreated manually"

So the most expensive part is entirely manual today. And all of it has to fit inside the three-to-four-week window between Partner Launch and Commercial Launch.

What we built does this instead: the book open in Word is read on one press, a service works out what it should become, and our InDesign panel lays it out in the designer's open document. On the reference book that takes about five minutes, and nobody has to sit and watch it.

The rest of this document explains where those four numbers come from, what is still missing, and how the pipeline is run. In order: what the process costs today, one run measured line by line, the gains and the limits, then the operator's guide.

The process today, and its six hand-offs

1. Authoring. The Official Book is written in a single shared Word file by authors, subject-matter experts and editors. The requirement document draws the consequence itself: multi-author, so the formatting is naturally inconsistent.
2. Three beta rounds. After beta 2 the file is styled in Word according to the company style guide; at the end of beta 3 content and styling are final.
3. The typesetting window. There are three to four weeks between Partner Launch and Commercial Launch, and the InDesign typesetting must be finished inside it. This is the one hard schedule fact in the whole record.
4. Manual typesetting. The content is copied out of Word and formatted by hand using the existing template and the required styles.
5. Chapter split. Word keeps every chapter in one file; InDesign wants one file per chapter, because its Book feature needs separate files to produce an automatic table of contents and continuous page numbers.
6. Dual maintenance. From that point on, every correction is applied by hand to both the Word file and the InDesign file.

The supported route does not help either: when the Word file is imported directly, only basic styles (heading, body) partly survive. Tables, objects and figures do not — they are recreated by hand.

The scale of the work

The reference book is not a friendly sample. It is a real file, and we chose the hard one.

All of it has to fit the three-to-four-week window, and then be maintained twice over for every correction.

And the input is not always the same

The same corpus holds a second book the pipeline already worked on. The comparison is the strongest evidence in the project that real input is not what you assume:

Read it this way: Product's author controlled pagination with semantic tools. Experience's author did the same job by brute force — empty paragraphs and direct spacing. Our first pipeline was built on the semantic signal, and this book does not give it. Today's pipeline therefore rests on measurement, not on the author's discipline.

One run, end to end

Everything below is from a single run: 7 September 2026, the whole book, session ts_544261e4e3bf. The times are from the panel's own log.

Reading takes about 105 seconds; drawing took 2 minutes 56 seconds on this run. Drawing time varies with InDesign's own process state — a repeat of the identical program took 5 minutes 37 seconds — so plan for roughly two minutes of reading and three to six minutes of drawing, and expect a human to be involved exactly once: to press the consent button.

What "3,627 applied" actually counts

The service does not draw anything itself. It works out what should happen and writes it down as a list of instructions, which can be read and checked before a single page is touched. On this run the list held 4,198 instructions, and every one of them that puts content on a page was carried out:

So 3,627 of 3,627 is not a percentage or an estimate — it is the sum of those four lines, and "0 deferred" means nothing was left out. The remaining instructions in the list are structural: the whitespace the author used, the page breaks they asked for, and the opening and closing of each section.

Measured gains

Every row was measured on a run and corresponds to something a reader would see.

Stakeholder criteria and where they stand

The criteria were set in a meeting as a series of target states rather than a single KPI. As recorded, with what is measured against each today:

Honest limits

Everything below is measured and reported by the run itself — a reader does not have to discover it.

How we know

There is one rule in this project: a number is either measured or it is not stated. What that looks like in practice:

The same program, twice

A fair question: are 387 pages and 53/80 a stable property of the pipeline, or a lucky run? The cleanest experiment in the record answers it, and the input was proven identical rather than assumed: with the run's own identifier removed, the two plans are byte-for-byte identical — 4,198 instructions each.

The honest formulation: the same program produces the same book, and the defect tally and the wall-clock do not repeat. The single extra defect is one page handed back at one section close — one of the ±1 decisions taken at every close. What this buys is a noise floor: a change of one defect or one page is inside the noise, and a change of nine sections or nineteen pages is not. That is what makes the run-to-run comparisons meaningful.

Three times a measurement killed a plausible belief

Part 2

How to use it

This part is for the people who will run it: what you prepare in Word, what you press, what you will be waiting for, what comes back, and what the designer finishes in InDesign. Setting the tools up on a machine is a one-off IT task and is not covered here.

Before you press anything

Five things the run will not fix for you. All five are yours to check, and they take under a minute.

1. Turn markup off in Word. Review → Tracking → Display for Review → No Markup. Comment balloons and displayed revisions change where Word breaks its pages, so a book read under them would describe a document nobody is looking at. The service refuses such a reading rather than quietly using it. The pane's own Info tab carries this same instruction under "Before you run".
2. Leave only the target document open in InDesign. The panel writes into the document that is open, and the permission card says "the document open in InDesign" in the singular. If your template, last month's book and a scratch file are all open, close the others first — that is the one instruction that removes all doubt about where four thousand commands are about to land.
3. Open the Dinno panel in InDesign — and click its Transfer tab. This is the step nobody guesses. The panel opens on Receive, and the permission card only exists on Convert and Transfer. Nothing announces an arriving transfer: no badge, no tab switch, no sound. A designer sitting on Receive sees an empty panel while Word says it is waiting for them.
4. Do not work in InDesign while it runs. The panel does one thing at a time; anything else you ask of InDesign queues up behind a few thousand commands.
5. Know that the pane will change tabs by itself. It brings Report forward once when a run starts and once when it ends. That is a setting, not a glitch — see the two settings below.

Running a book

In Word: the Typeset tab

The tab opens with a Document card naming your file, and three status rows — Word, Engine, Panel — which are the three things that have to be true before anything can run. Each row carries a ? that opens its own explanation, and a row that is in trouble opens its explanation by itself and closes it again once the fault clears.

The button's label is the whole progress display. It walks through:

Read this book  →  Checking the document…  →  Reading the document…
   →  Sending it to the engine…  →  Planning the transfer…
   →  Handing it to InDesign…  →  Waiting for the designer
   →  InDesign is typesetting…  →  Start a new transfer

There are more labels than these, and each one is a real state rather than a spinner: "Retry connection" when nothing answered, "Pair this device in Settings" if the service asks for pairing, "Reconnect" after three failed status checks, "Start over" when a transfer was declined or abandoned, "Try again" after a fault in Word. If the button is not moving, read it — it is telling you which of those you are in.

Choosing what to typeset

The process stops in exactly one place, and that place is the only decision that is yours: "Regions — what to typeset". A region is one block of the book — a chapter, or the front matter — found by planning the document. Each row shows its name and which Word pages it covers, with All and None above the list.

Nothing is written while it plans. That is worth knowing: you can read and plan a book as often as you like without touching any InDesign document. Picking one chapter is the fast way to look at real pages before committing to the whole book.

In InDesign: giving permission

The panel raises an amber card titled "Signal received — Word transfer ready" naming the document and what is about to happen:

ITIL_Experience_Official_Book_EN_v5.1.docx
80 region(s) · 3992 component(s) · Word 363 page(s) → predicted 401
whitespace: 363 kept as spacing · 44 as page break(s) · 2 excluded as tracked deletions
This will add pages and text to the document open in InDesign.
                                        [ Start transfer ]   [ Dismiss ]

Three things worth knowing:

• After ten minutes Word is told nobody started it. The card itself does not expire — it stays on screen until you answer it, and pressing Start transfer even then still runs the transfer.
• Start transfer is safe to press twice — the card disappears before a second click can land.
• Dismiss is not silent. Declining is reported back to Word, so nobody waits ten minutes to be told that nobody started it.

How long it takes

On the full reference book — 363 Word pages — measured over eleven consecutive runs:

The layout time varies with how busy InDesign itself is: two runs of the identical book took 2 minutes 56 seconds and 5 minutes 37 seconds. Plan for six.

What comes back

Two reports, one on each side, and they answer different questions. The panel says what happened to the pages. The pane says what happened to the run.

In InDesign: where every page went

In Word: the Report tab

The seven stages are on the Report tab, not on Typeset — this is worth knowing because the pane brings Report forward by itself and people assume they lost their place. Before anything has run the tab says so plainly instead of showing an empty frame.

A stage that never ran says "not attempted" rather than looking clean. That distinction is the whole point of the list.

Two settings that change how a run behaves

Both are under Settings → Transfer, both default to On, and both are worth knowing before they surprise you.

Pairing: when the engine asks whose device this is

On the engine you run on your own machine, nothing ever asks you to pair — the pane, the panel and the service are all on one desk and the service takes every caller at its word. A deployed engine cannot do that: it answers several people, so before it does work for a plugin it has to know whose plugin it is. That is all pairing is. It happens once per plugin per machine, it takes about twenty seconds, and it is the only moment in this product where a browser window is part of the job.

What the plugin shows you is a code. What you do with it happens on the engine's own web page, in your browser, where you are signed in — and that separation is the point. Your password is never typed into the pane or the panel. The plugin never sees it and could not use it if it did; what the plugin ends up holding is a credential the engine minted for that one device, which you can take away again at any time.

After Yes, the page says Paired and the plugin picks it up on its own within a few seconds — there is nothing to copy back. From then on every call the plugin makes to the engine carries its own credential, and no further browser round trip is needed: the engine checks a signature rather than calling home, which is what keeps a two-hundred-page run fast.

What this section does not yet cover

• A deployed engine can be configured not to insist. There are three settings — off, warn and require — and the rollout deliberately runs in warn for a period, where an unpaired plugin is still served and the engine only records it. Pairing during that window is real and worth doing; enforcement is a later, separate flip.
• Tokens survive a restart only if the deployment says so. An engine started without a configured signing key generates one at boot and says so in its own health line, and every paired device is silently unpaired the next time the service restarts. This is a deployment setting, not something a designer can see from the pane.
• Sign-in is provider-dependent. The engine can host its own directory — invitation, enrolment, sign-in — or defer to the corporate one. Which of the two you meet is decided when the engine is deployed, and only the first screen differs; everything above is the same either way.

Sending one thing instead of a whole book

The book run is not the only way in, and the other way is the one people reach for daily. Select something in Word, and the Send tab will place just that at the designer's cursor in InDesign — no plan, no permission card, no page budget.

What it recognises today: a table, a figure, a run of paragraphs, and a floating drawing. When nothing is selected, a row of chips states plainly which kinds are live and which are still to come. Select something and the card lights up with what it found as its heading — and it is a different card for each kind, with its own buttons. The one line they all share is the one that matters: "Put your cursor where it should land in InDesign, then send." The send goes to wherever the designer's cursor is.

What the designer does next

When the run finishes you have a typeset InDesign document. It is not a finished book, and it is not meant to be. Here is the work that remains, in the order it should be done.

1. Expect Word's style names in the Paragraph Styles panel. This is the thing most worth knowing in advance. The styles are created with the names they have in Word — so you will find Normal, Heading 1, Bullets, FigureCaption, Chapter1, and also the author's leftovers: p1, para, Style0, normaltextrun. On the reference book, 29 styles were created. A style the document already has under exactly that name is left untouched, so if your template carries the same names, your template wins. If it does not, expect to map them once.
2. Generate the real lists. The table of contents, list of figures, list of tables and index exist in Word only as a stale snapshot; carrying those page numbers across would put wrong numbers in a printed book. Each was reduced to a single marker, and the real lists are generated in InDesign. Those pages carry a purple band that says so.
3. Then remove the bands. Every part of a band — the panel, the logo and the text — carries the script label DINNO_RESERVE_BAND, so the whole set can be found and deleted in one pass. Run Window → Utilities → Scripts → User → clear-reserve-bands; it reports how many it removed and writes the same line to a log beside the document. It does not ship with the panel yet — someone has to copy tools/indesign/clear-reserve-bands.jsx into your user Scripts Panel folder once before that entry appears. Nothing else moves: the bands sit outside the text and text wrap is off on every one. Find/Change cannot do this, and an earlier version of this guide said it could: its Object tab searches object format, not script labels, and it changes formatting rather than deleting objects.
4. Know what not to delete. The text frames are labelled DINNO_TS:… and the text flows through them — deleting one breaks the flow. Everything the pipeline added carries a label; nothing it added is anonymous. The full list is in the reference.
5. Add what is not carried. Pages 1 and 2 are correctly sized but blank: the cover art is not read. Headers, footers and page numbers live on master pages — they are not carried from Word in the manual process either. Decorative shapes are not carried.
6. Read the report. The run states what it could not do, with numbers. Which of those matter is below.

Reading the report

When a run finishes, the Word pane's Report tab shows what happened. It reports both what it did and what it could not do, and the second half is the part worth reading.

The numbers that tell you the run was healthy

Not every message is a problem

The reference run reported thirty items. Nineteen of them were the same harmless one. Read them in three groups:

If something looks wrong

Part 3

Reference for the designer

Everything added carries a label

In InDesign a script label is a piece of text attached to an object. It is invisible on the page, it survives saving and reopening, and you read it in Window → Utilities → Script Label. Nothing this pipeline adds is anonymous — every frame it creates carries a handle, so you can always tell what came from Word and what came from you.

Two ways to use them: click an object and read its label to identify it, or run a script that finds by label to act on a whole set at once. Not Edit → Find/Change — its Object tab searches object format, not script labels, and it changes formatting rather than deleting objects.

The band always looks the same so it is recognised on sight: a purple panel in the book's own accent colour, white text, the fixed title RESERVED PAGE, and beneath it the reason that page is empty — taken from the run's own record, never invented.

Glossary