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• • July 24, 2015 at 10:29 am #76860
    Holly Tarquinio

    Member

    Hello All,

    I’m more of a lurker here so excuse my lack of posting stats. I’m an in-house graphic designer for a publishing group. Among other things we publish an annual catalog of western performance horse stallions. For the pedigree portion of the layouts, database information is exported into a tagged .TXT file. Those files are then placed into InDesign. This allows the database manager to update pedigree information from year to year. The design/production team handle the remaining information in the layouts.

    We redesigned the layouts this year. We recreated the text boxes for the database information but made sure to import the same paragraph styles that the tagged text was formatted to interact with. However, we’ve found that the tagged .TXT files are not importing properly. They give us error warnings and either don’t import at all or import improperly formatted. I have never worked with tagged text before so I am at a loss as to how to go about fixing this. My production manager thinks we may have to copy and past the old files text boxes into the new layout files to fix the problem.

    The database system is 30 years old at least and was custom built. The original InDesign files have been used for the last 13 years and previous to that QuarkXPress was used. So I fear I’m dealing with a programming issue that dates to before my time.

    Is there any resource I could use to learn more about tagged text? Or can anyone shed any light on what may be going on? I’m not expecting a miracle. I would like to learn more about how tagged text functions within InDesign in order to understand how to help my production manager fix this issue. Oh, if it helps to know we are using InDesign CS3.

    Many thanks in advance,
    Holly

  • July 24, 2015 at 10:35 am #76861
    Holly Tarquinio

    Member

    Not sure if this information would help but the tagged text is <ASCII-MAC> formatted.

  • July 24, 2015 at 11:10 am #76863
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I wonder if you’re using some third-party plug-in for importing text, such as Xtags (emsoftware.com). Are you saying that you can open the old InDesign files in your current version of InDesign and import the text and it works, but it doesn’t work with new files?

    How sure are you that the exported data hasn’t changed?

    Tagged Text is a pain, to be honest, and no longer well supported in InDesign. Most people who want to do database publishing use some other tool, such as Data Merge or free scripts based on data merge, or a more expensive solution such as InData or EasyCatalog. I talk about that in detail in my lynda.com course on the subject.

  • July 24, 2015 at 12:25 pm #76866
    Holly Tarquinio

    Member

    Hi David,

    Yes it appears that when I open last year’s InDesign files and import the database files they import. When I’ve tried importing the same database files into the new layout (Same version of Indesign CS3) we get the warning/error. If they’ve used any third party plug-ins in the past I am unaware. I’m not really involved in the heavy production of the catalog so there may be elements of the process they use that I’m unaware of. I don’t have any reason to believe the exported data has changed. They’ve used the same database and methods for years here. The change was us re-designing the layout template in InDesign.

    I’m learning quite quickly that tagged text is very much a pain lol. I will share your course link with my production manager. Our company does have a Lynda account and I did a search for tagged text but never came across your link. So thank you for sharing it. It may be the beginning of a new process for us. Your response is much appreciated!

  • July 24, 2015 at 2:44 pm #76867
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    I’m a bit confused, and apologies.

    But–you said you have been using InDesign files, but then said you just re-designed the file for InDesign. Can you clarify?

    If the job was previously done in Quark, then you can’t use Quark tags when importing text into InDesign (unless you use xTags).

    What kind of error messages are you getting?

    I import tagged text files all the time, but they are word files that we have run macros on. Nothing so far as databases or anything.

  • July 27, 2015 at 1:35 am #76901
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    From what I remember, two things to look out for:
    1. as mentioned above, importing tagged text is very sensitive to the combination of text format (ASCII-Mac/Win/DOS/Unicode) and line endings (CRLF or LF or CR). Could that have changed on your source file? Or possibly on your import settings? Ours used UTF16 and Unix LF.
    2. Is it possible that there’s a < or > symbol somewhere in the data itself (not in the tags)? This would need to be escaped to avoid it being seen as an unmatched part of a tag. That caused me no end of headaches until we worked it out. i.e. “greater than zero degrees C” had to have a backslash added before the greater-than sign: \>0°C, otherwise it caused the file place to fail in InDesign.

    Good luck,
    Chris.

  • July 28, 2015 at 10:08 am #76962
    Holly Tarquinio

    Member

    Are my responses going through? I don’t see them?

  • July 28, 2015 at 10:40 am #76963
    Holly Tarquinio

    Member

    I’ve tried reply a few times now…so apologies if they all end up posting.

    To answer Dwayne’s questions: The recent redesign was not from Quark to InDesign. The layouts have been in InDesign for many years now. When I mentioned Quark I meant the very original layouts were done there. The error message I receive Prompts me to respond to a detailed list of Tagged Text Errors. It gives me the option to Continue, Cancel or Save Log. The details make me think there’s something amiss with the paragraph style names.

    Thank you Chris, I’ll share your response with my production manager.

    Again thanks to all for your help. This is a weird one for me.

    Be Well,
    Holly

    • July 28, 2015 at 10:59 am #76970
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Holly–I think the problems are what ThompsonText described. If it’s a tagged file for InDesign, the paragraph styles and other coding are enclosed in open and closed angle brackets < >.

      If something else has an opening bracket it will cause InDesign to give an error as when it sees the open angle bracket it’s expecting a paragraph style name, character style name, ascii code, etc.

  • July 28, 2015 at 10:40 am #76966
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Sorry, Holly! Sometimes our forum does that… I had to go in and give it a nudge. :-)

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