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• • June 29, 2017 at 10:29 am #95750
    Dixie Church

    Member

    InDesign CC 2017
    I have a customer who once a year has a 16 page annual report. I lay the report out, do what we do, then the customer wants a Word file they can send to their editor friend to correct grammatical errors. In Word. I already said that, didn’t I.
    Anyway, I used TextExporter to export the text as an .rtf, and as a test, I opened that in Word, all text was styled like it was in InDesign, I saved it, then poured it back into InDesign and all was great… I thought…
    When I actually got the file back, I poured the .rtf file into an empty text box in InDesign and while all the formatting was “there” it didn’t hold my style sheets and was styled “default”, so I had to go back and reapply all the paragraph/character style sheets. Not difficult, but time consuming and the chance to miss restyling a bold or italic was there.
    I know there are several scripts, plugins, etc. that cost $$$. This is a once a year project for a non-profit so it doesn’t warrant spending any kind of money.
    I’m hoping I’m missing something very simple to get that file back and forth easily and hang on to those paragraph and character styles. Unfortunatly a tagged text file isn’t an option, either…
    Ideas? Anybody? Buller?

  • June 29, 2017 at 11:05 am #95752
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Are the paragraph or character styles saved inside folders (what InDesign calls style “groups”)? That is the most common problem with exporting/importing losing its styles.

  • June 29, 2017 at 11:06 am #95753
    Dixie Church

    Member

    Nope no groups, just loose.

  • June 29, 2017 at 12:44 pm #95754
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    I’ve never had a problem with losing styles (or having it be default) when importing RTF files. But then again when I exported to RTF I didn’t use any plug-ins, but just used InDesign’s export feature (no plug-in required). I wonder if the plug-in is causing the problem (when it exports).

  • June 29, 2017 at 10:21 pm #95767
    Lindsey Martin

    Member

    I use Text Exporter (Rorohiko) to export text from ID to RTF frequently. I just tested a file that I had handed off to an author by placing the edited version in a blank doc. I didn’t bother to place it in the template where it originated because I recall that it came in quite well. In this case, most of the text came it with styles intact, each style marked as imported. Footnotes didn’t keep their style and, where the author had added paragraphs, some had picked up the para. style from the subhead before though the formatting was fine. So, it doesn’t appear that Text Exporter is the problem.

    Did you check the import options when importing?

  • June 30, 2017 at 12:53 pm #95779
    Dixie Church

    Member

    Text Exporter (Rorohiko) saved me as none of the text boxes were linked so having the text in one document was extremely helpful.
    I didn’t check the import options, but I did go back to my test file and that worked perfectly, all styles came in as expected, even into a blank document. (Just tried messing with the import options, no change).
    I use Word 2007 on the PC and my InDesign is on a Mac. I don’t know the version of Word the customer used, so I’m thinking a newer version of Word may be the problem. I did notice that my Helvetica Neue fonts became Helvetica so who knows what happened, operator, software or gremlins.
    Oh well, at least it wasn’t a 1000 page book but then I’d have a reason to spend some $$ on the fabulous scripts and plugins there are out there. Thanks for your help!

    • June 30, 2017 at 2:12 pm #95782
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Hopefully you’ll get it figured out, Dixie.

      Maybe try a test and once you export the .rtf file, resave it was a Word file? And see how that imports back in?

  • June 30, 2017 at 2:40 pm #95784
    Dixie Church

    Member

    Thank you for the suggestion, but that imported worse.

    It’s weird, I’ve tested both Word 2007 and 2010 the rtf imports just fine. I reached out to my customer to see if the editor may have done something to the file, now it’s the only thing I can think of.

    Off for 5 days, so ya’ll enjoy the weekend and thanks again for the input. I’m solo here and have no one but myself to bounce things off of.
    ENjoy~!

  • July 2, 2017 at 9:04 pm #95803
    Lindsey Martin

    Member

    I have had authors take my carefully exported RTF, open it in MSWord, select all, and apply the typeface or style they prefer.

  • July 17, 2017 at 1:02 pm #96160
    Dixie Church

    Member

    I’m sure it was something like that exactly. They’ve decided to have the editor do all his corrections first, then I’ll import it and do the layout. Once I told them they could save $$ this way, they were quite open to it.
    Another problem solved ;-)

  • July 18, 2017 at 7:11 am #96184
    Betty Taylor

    Member

    I have not used this software, but it sounds like WordsFlow might be just what you need.

    I first heard about WordsFlow at The InDesign Conference in 2015. It allows the InDesign user to push changes out to a Word document. Then, when the Word doc is updated, the changes can be pulled back into InDesign. There is a free trial.

    WordsFlow

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