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• • September 7, 2012 at 7:25 am #63084
    debs84

    Participant

    I import a lot of word documents into InDesign and roughly 20-30% of the time have a problem where when I import, a few letters of text, which could be from anywhere in the document, are not in their original location but at the very end of the document.

    It's normally straightforward enough to go back to the original Word document and work out where they have come from, but it's annoying and I'd love to know why it happens and if it's possible to fix! I (and colleagues) have checked carefully over the Word documents to look for odd line breaks, text in the wrong font, everything we can think of…but can't find a good reason why it happens.

    Any ideas?

    Thank you!

  • September 7, 2012 at 7:56 am #63085
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Very weird. Haven't seen that. I would suggest Word doc corruption. Try doing a Save As and importing the new file into InDesign? Or try saving on a different computer?

  • September 7, 2012 at 8:36 am #63087
    Gert Verrept

    Member

    I've this problem too, but only for footnotes that are in tables in word. They become endnotes in Indesign.

    Sometimes an empty foootnote reference that can cause the problem. What happens too, is that sometimes it goes well on one pc and not on another. Saving in rtf and then importing can help. My rule: lots of footnotes in word, use “place”, otherwise you can try using “copy – paste”.

  • September 7, 2012 at 9:30 am #63090
    debs84

    Participant

    Thanks for the suggestions.

    I've tried Save As and using a new file, and that doesn't work. It's also not just me who has the problem, also my colleagues, so which computer is being used doesn't seem to matter.

    There are also definitely no empty footnote references on these files.

  • September 7, 2012 at 4:07 pm #63097
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Been there, seen it, complained to Adobe Tech Support too. Their answer was something along the line of “but of course the text may change from Word to InDesign. The page size may be different, the margins or font size may be changed, and InDesign's spacing works differently. It's not reasonable to expect the text to appear in the same place.” They conveniently overlooked the fact that I sent my Word document, the same file imported into ID, and even screenshots with huge red arrows pointing to text that (admittedly) was “not on the same place”.

    This issue is the bane of my life. There simply is no reason as to why Word or ID would do this. Sometimes saving the doc as RTF works, but at times a file is literally haunted by it and it keeps on coming up.

    I have the faintest inkling of what it's caused by — if you happen to have hyperlinks in that same file, you will see their ID position shifts up first one character, then a couple, then lots. So it seems there is some kind of invisible code inside Word that InDesign refuses to “count”, leading to mis-synchronization of text attributes, and ultimately to bits of text.

    You don't mention which version of InDesign you are using, but I would bet it's CS4. In most cases it helps if you import the file into a CS3 version (which does not have this error as often!); but if you only have one version of Id, all you can do is trying to save from within Word as RTF, or perhaps as a slightly older version of Word.

  • September 8, 2012 at 6:49 pm #63101
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    I switched from PageMaker to InDesign with ID2, and in InDesign's lengthy development since then its reliability in importing Word documents seems to have gone from reasonable to voodoo. When I see text misplaced, my first thought is someone forgot to accept all the tracked changes: before importing any Word file into InDesign, I generate a PDF, which makes tracked changes obvious, and resolve them before trying to bring the file into ID.

    Another major casualty of the voodoo is footnotes, some of which disappear in ways that defy understanding. I used to think the losses related to the fact that most of my (admittedly specialized) work includes East Asian characters, and I supposed the multi-byte encoding threw off ID's import routines. However, others have reported the same problems with simpler text. My specialization in scholarly work also means some of the manuscripts I receive were prepared using Endnote to handle citations, relevant here because Endnote adds data to Word files invisible to ordinary human readers and quite possibly falling into Jongware's category of “invisible code inside Word that InDesign refuses to 'count'” (see InDesign CS5: Workaround for missing footnotes bug).

    Sad to say, it is all to easy to think the InDesign programmers simply haven't kept up with features added to Word files.

    David

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