Reply To: Importing Word: Random parts of text appearing at end of document

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