Stanford wrote:
I’m trying to paste text from Word 2008 for Mac into InDesign CS5. When I do, the text comes in as an image, not editable text. I cannot seem to get around this, and the Paste without Formatting option is grayed out. I’ve used InDesign since 2003, and I’ve never seen this, especially since it’s just text, not a graphic, in Word.
You know, this started happening to me, too! Honestly, I’m not sure when it started. But now it appears to be an epidemic!
However, I have discovered a workaround: If you paste with nothing selected in InDesign, you get an image of text. If you create a text frame and paste into it, you get normal text.
(Unfortunately, if you paste once and get a graphic, and then create a text frame and paste into it, you still get a graphic. I think that when you paste the first time, the clipboard gets “solidified” into a graphic form and won’t change back. So you would need to go back to Word and select the text again.)
Why the change? Was it Word? I don’t think it’s version CS5, as this happens to me in CS4, too. Or was it my long-overdue upgrade to Snow Leopard? No, it appears to be problematic in 10.5.8, too. I still suspect the operating system.
That said, my (somewhat limited) understanding is that when you Copy something to the clipboard, the program (Word or whatever else you’re using) puts a list of “file types” that it supports up there. Then, when you switch to a different program and Paste, the target program looks at the list and chooses which format it wants to use. If that’s the case (any programmers want to weigh in?) then it actually might just be InDesign requesting the wrong thing.
If anyone knows a way to tell Word to stop putting the PNG up on the clipboard (or to tell InDesign to stop grabbing it), that’d be very interesting.
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on June 29, 2010
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