CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • October 23, 2018 at 3:35 am #111091
    John Kelsall

    Member

    Hi everyone

    Just wanted to point out a bug in the new InDesign. As typesetters we have to deal with lots and lots of Word files supplied by authors. We have realised over the years that Word .docx files can create problems with missing text, loss of italics and other anomalies and so convert them to .doc files prior to importing them into InDesign. The .doc files are much better as they create hardly any problems with InDesign.

    We have just used InDesign CC2019 with the ‘Static Endnotes’ ticked and that is where we noticed the bug. All the footnote/endnote indicators in the text are no longer superior and have lost the character style applied to them. This means that we cannot pick out the indicators from the main text in a search and get them back to being superior.

    If we import the same Word file into InDesign but as a .docx file, then the footnote/endnote indicators work fine and retain their character styles.

    This means .docx files work with InDesign CC2019 but .doc do not. What a shame. We will not be able to use CC2019 for importing as we will never use .docx files due to the problems they cause.

    Just thought I’d mention it …

  • October 23, 2018 at 6:43 am #111093
    Tim Murray

    Member

    I’ve been using .docx since its introduction in 2006 and have never had a problem with it, perhaps because I take Word docs and make sure things like italics and bolds and similar have name character styles applied. Any problem encounter was usually a matter of poor work by the author. Also, the .doc format is most likely going be deprecated, so I’d say it’s best to get on the bus.

  • October 23, 2018 at 7:59 am #111095
    John Kelsall

    Member

    Thanks for your post. I know what you are saying and I normally keep up to date with the latest trends, but we truly have had lots of problems with .docx files. In fact a large publishing house in London just a few months ago were having problems bringing in Author word files and asked us if we could provide them with any help. We instructed them to save them as .doc files first and it solved their problem. As we do not use .docx anymore it is hard to remember the exact problems they can cause but I remember odd footnotes missing; hidden text within Word appearing in the InDesign file when it should not appear, etc. With the hundreds of books we do we find that are so many odd things that Author’s do to their Word files.
    As we are typesetters our work is very precise and varied – we do quite a lot of quite complicated work with Maths, Arabic – lots of books for University Presses – and if there is anything missing/changed or added then we are at fault and we would have to pay for any wasted printing costs. It is just not worth the risk unfortunately. If we used .docx files and 9 out of 10 books were OK, that is just not good enough for us. Hopefully an InDesign CC2019 update will fix this issue.

  • October 23, 2018 at 8:46 am #111104
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I would not expect Adobe to do a lot of work on improving the .doc import filters… it’s a very old format and is likely being deprecated by everyone (including Microsoft).

    In general, my recommendation is to import .docx and only if it’s not working, then try .doc. (Some files do seem to work better as .doc, but I’ve never identified a pattern.) If that doesn’t work, then sometimes .RTF is the way to go.

    That said, the problem is often that InDesign users rely on whatever the author or editor gives them, without doing clean-up in Word first. I highly recommend a workflow in which you clean up the file in Word, then do a Save As to ensure you have a clean Word file (with proper styles, etc.) before importing into InDesign.

  • October 23, 2018 at 10:42 am #111105
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    I’m in the same boat as John, I work as a typesetter for a publisher and we’ve had similar issues with .docx and InDesign. We have also gone back to using .doc files for the same reason.

    I’m also glad someone said something about the dropped superscripting on the footnote references, I did my first book in CC2019 and just thought I didn’t import the files the correct way or something. Glad I’m not the only one seeing that issue.

  • November 6, 2018 at 11:28 am #111355
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    I just tried importing a .docx file into CC2019 and had the same dropped superscripting issue that I had previously with importing a .doc file. I had to finish importing all the files in CC2017 to keep the superscripting from the Word files.

• Author
  Posts