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• • May 25, 2011 at 5:02 am #59692
    lirmac

    Member

    When importing a styled Word doc, character attributes (such as italic or small caps) are importing correctly, but are then applied to the rest of the text until the beginning of another style causes them to end. Example:

    The cat sat on the mat. [New style starts]

    will import as

    The cat sat on the mat. [New style starts]

    Has anyone else experienced this issue?

  • May 25, 2011 at 7:04 am #59694
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Yep. Pretty annoying, isn't it?

    Also incredibly annoying is that the Adobe Help Line refused to take an in-depth look at this, and several other problems I found, with importing Word files. I've filed bug reports by the dozens and even send in screen shots of “how the file looks in Word and what ID makes of it” — all to no avail.

    Hey, did you know you can now add a picture slide show for the iPad in InDesign CS5.5!? After all, it's all about priorities.

    (Ed.: Ooo I see you are using CS5. That's too bad — all of my bad experiences are in CS4 so far, and I secretly hoped Newer would be Better.)

  • May 25, 2011 at 8:17 am #59695
    lirmac

    Member

    Oh dear. Sorry to be the bearer of bad CS5 tidings… But reassuring to know I'm not alone.

  • May 25, 2011 at 4:00 pm #59700
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Ah well. I've never found out what this behavior is triggered by, but it seems very persistent: at work I have several different versions of Word, but a file that's “broken” cannot be made to work by re-saving in any other version. That encompasses saving as .doc, .docx, and .rtf — if the file is broken, it'll stay broken. Let's hear a Yay! for Word's persistent Backwards-Compatible objects.

    Once or twice I got so fed up I saved the file as .rtf and opened and then re-saved it with WordPad. Now that's a sure-fire way of expunging every single nasty bit from a file! It's just too bad some of the 'good' stuff goes along with it … You can realistically only do this with files that are plain text to begin with.

    By the way, most — unfortunately, not all! — Word files with issues import just fine into CS3. If you have one of these lying around, import the text in there, save, open in CS4 / CS5 / CS6 (hypothetically), then copy the text out of it into the target document.

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