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• • June 14, 2014 at 2:31 pm #69001
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    In Design Problems

    Greetings,

    I have a question about updating Word documents for novels that are being transferred into InDesign. I tried to update the latest edition of my novel to my self-publishing company and ran into all kinds of problems when they tried to transfer them into InDesign.

    They informed me that they had errors transferring the file into InDesign with the file I had created and they asked if I could copy and past my edited version into the version they created for the 1st Edition. I did a straight copy from an RTF file document and past into their word document of each chapter separately thinking that this would be okay. They still had the same problems even with this method.

    They said that there were problems with cutting and pasting from one version of word to another version of word with InDesign. I am being told that I will need to take their original 1st edition copy and manually place all of my edits in.

    Is there a way to take large chunks of my book and paste them into Notepad text file, then copy from the notepad file into 1st edition word copy, and make the minor formatting changes that get lost in word so that InDesign won’t have a problem? Does InDesign have less problems with transfers of plain text from Notepad? Thanks.

    Regards,

    Ehav Ever ?

  • June 15, 2014 at 1:45 pm #69005
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    What kinds of problems are they having? What type of errors?

    So far as using plain text files, you have to realize that any formatting will be lost in plain text files. Things like italic, bold, etc.

    So far as different versions of word and the problem they are experiencing–it’s tough to say. I’ve never had a problem cutting/copying and pasting from Word into an Indesign file (so long as it’s not a lot of stuff). A paragraph or two here and there should not be a problem..

    I guess it depends upon how they are updating your file. Are they going to re-import the word file into InDesign and redo the whole thing, or do corrections and copy and paste the edits directly from Word to InDesign?

    If it’s two word files (their 1st edition is a Word file they’ve saved) and your new one, can’t they just do a compare and accept all changes?

    Sorry if I’m misunderstanding the problem they are having.

  • June 16, 2014 at 2:47 am #69021
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    InDesign has a preference for copying in styles from Word or other programs – see Edit>Preferences>Clipboard Handling

    Turn the switch to “Text Only” – and copying from Word won’t transfer the styles that are used in Word.

    This will give you a straight copy and paste from Word.

    • June 18, 2014 at 2:56 pm #69065
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Which works great, so long as there isn’t any italic or bold in the copied material.

      Normally, I take the word files of the inserts and run my macros on them, and then import the text so everything comes through (that’s if it’s a new paragraph or a replacement paragraph).

      If it’s a sentence or word, we usually just retype it or make the correction. It’s a lot faster to correct a word with a typo than to copy and paste it in.

      But if’s lines of type, then like you said Eugene, copy and paste as text only, and format as needed so far as italic and bold.

  • June 30, 2014 at 6:04 am #69204
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    What macros do you have Dwayne? Won’t you like to share it?

    • June 30, 2014 at 3:31 pm #69221
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Hey Masood:

      I’d like to share, but even though I wrote them, I think the company I work for owns them.

      Anyway–they clean up word files and put in the coding for italic, small caps, superiors, etc. Fixes spaces around em and en dashes, fixes ellipses so they have thing spaces between the periods, strips out double spaces, double returns, etc.

      But–they were written back in the Quark days. We still use them as we use xTags for InDesign, which converts the Quart codes. When we use a word file, we run several. When it’s keyboarded, we only use one (maybe two), and they key with Quark codes.

      It’s a lot easier to have them key @TX: than the much longer InDesign style code for it.

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