I posted this on another forum, but it seems my question may be curlier than I first thought – hoping there is some wizard out there that can help.
I have someone who is helping me put together a french version of a brochure for a friend. Because the .indd file was so large, I stripped out all the images and just sent the French man the text layer for him to translate. He is working on CS4, and I am on CS3
So when he sent the French translation back, I asked him to send me the .inx file as well.
All well and good so far…..
When I tried to open the .inx file, it came up with a bucketload of errors. The first was: Cannot open the document “C:[filename]”, A '<' character cannot be used in attribute '^1', except through &<
I opened the file with a text editor, and changed the attributes so that I could open it with CS2 in the hope it would work. No such luck, although it did tell me the line number that was causing the problems. By going back to the text editor, I was able to source the line and column causing the problem and deleted the problem area, then saved the file again.
[someone suggested that rather than deleting the information I should just find the < and put an & in front – didn't work]
Most of the later error messages (after I got past this first one), rambled on in a non-descript way about illegal leading characters. Each time I found the line and column number relating to the error, it appeared to be in the word
d'entraînement
and looked to relate to the funny “i” with the “hat on it”. So I went through and deleted all instances of this (using the text editor).
Finally I reached the end, and got all excited that it would finally open, only to find that it crashed Indesign. I gather that at least part of the problem relates to the French special letters – although my CS3 (and the old CS2 for that matter) show French dictionaries as an option, so I suppose that those characters are available on my system.
As for the first error – does this relate to the same thing?
I had a really good look at the offending line this morning, and it makes me think that it is something to do with the French symbols – <cfen pnam=”k_Punctuation” font=”c_Kozuka Mincho Pro” ptfs=”k_R” jcfs=”D_100″ phzs=”D_100″ pvts=”D_100″ jcfc=”c_??????????<>???????????(),./:;?[]{}~” plck=”b_t” jcfa=”b_t” bshf=”D_0″ Self=”rc_u71″/>
I do have this font installed on my system……
What to do? I simply can't afford to keep updating to the latest version of InDesign.
I had thought of asking him to just send me a word document, but then I can never be sure that I am placing the french version in the correct places within the layout.
Are there any wizards out there that can help me figure this out? I have quite a number of these brochures to do and it's doing my head in!!
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