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• • March 16, 2010 at 6:16 am #55175
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    I've noticed a few times when importing a large document to InDesign from Word that some of the characters at the end of paragraphs in the middle of the document get moved to the end of the document, so at the end you'll have several lines like this:

    es

    .

    fer cycles.

    rred.

    I haven't found any common factor in the documents this happens to, nor in the characters moved or the paragraphs they're moved from. Obviously this is a nuisance as I have to find and restore the source paragraphs.

    Any idea why this happens, or how to stop it?

  • March 16, 2010 at 7:12 am #55177
    Eugene Tyson

    Member

    Could be tracked changes? Accept all the tracked changes before importing?

    I've not noticed anything like that before though?

  • March 17, 2010 at 1:37 am #55180
    BoydE

    Participant

    I've experienced the same thing, doesn't seem to be any obvious reason, and I've ensured tracked changes have been accepted before importing the file.

    One of the first things I do now is check the end of the imported file to try to ensure that the moved text is returned to its correct position in the document before I begin the layout proper.

  • March 17, 2010 at 2:59 am #55181
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Seen it once too often, and send that file (with the ID result) to Adobe tech support. I explained that text was cut off and appeared at the end of the document. Their reply (after a couple o'weeks): “Oh, that's because the margins in Word are different than those of your ID document. You can't expect every paragraph to be broken the same.”

    That caused a loud “D'oh!” to reverb to the jongware office.

    I re-submitted it, telling them to take a closer look, and haven't heard back since.

    By the way, re-saving the file from Word, as regular DOC, as RTF, or as DOCX sometimes works. In case it doesn't, I still have a CS3 nearby, and in every case so far that imported a troublesome document flawless.

  • March 17, 2010 at 5:20 am #55183
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    That is very funny (and sad) Theun. Wow.

    Unfortunately, InDesign's Word import filter is not one of its strongest features. I agree with your ideas of saving as RTF or DOCX to sometimes clean up weirdness.

  • March 18, 2010 at 4:57 am #55195
    hancilt

    Member

    Yes, in my experience the sequence: accept changes, convert to DOCX and then import fixes most of the problems described above. It fixes even the annoying thing that CS3 or cs4 sometimes “forgets” to import a footnotes, or skips one or messes up their sequence which results in shifting several manually from place to place. But in my exprience the RTF format makes things often worse /expecially documents with multiple alphabets and footnotes are nightmare in RTF)

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