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• • January 23, 2018 at 11:37 am #101166
    Steven Hiatt

    Member

    InDesign CC 2015 / Mac

    InDesign did something extremely odd on my current project–something I hadn’t noticed before. On importing a chapter text file, it dropped paragraphs, seemingly randomly–sometimes just one paragraph, sometimes two or three or four in a row (and never, so far as I can tell, just occasional stretches of words within a paragraph, always whole paragraphs). Altogether accounting for perhaps 20% of the text.

    I’m unable to detect anything special about these paragraphs. Before importing, I had 1) saved the file down to, but not including, the last paragraph maker in Word and coping that text into a new RTF file, which should have taken care of a lot of Word detritus.

    Does anyone have experience with this problem–and what to do about it? It has me rather spooked: if InDesign cannot reliably import text, then that’s a very great concern indeed.

  • January 23, 2018 at 5:28 pm #101169
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    That does sound really weird. I haven’t seen that before. While RTF should work, I would try doing a save as and importing it as .docx if possible. Something must be really odd with that file.

  • January 23, 2018 at 5:29 pm #101170
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Oh, one other thing popped into mind: After importing, did you look at it in Story Editor (Edit > Edit in Story Editor)? I wonder if the text really is there but is invisible on the document page for some reason.

  • January 23, 2018 at 6:42 pm #101171
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    I know in old versions of Word that authors/editors would highlight the paragraph text and tag it a “hidden” or something. The text would still show up, but when you imported or printed, it would not appear as it was hidden.

    I believe it was prior to Word 2011 when it happened. In Word 2016–it definitely disappears (i.e., is invisible), but in older versions, it showed up and you could see it–but it disappeared when importing.

    As a note–it would appear if saved as a text file.

    Check the .rtf file and highlight the text and go to the font style. If “hidden” is checked, then that is the problem.

  • January 24, 2018 at 3:21 pm #101209
    Steven Hiatt

    Member

    Thanks to David and Dwayne for their suggestions. I ended up just pasting in the missing text.

    • January 24, 2018 at 3:44 pm #101211
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Glad you were able to get it done by copying and pasting, though that sounds like a pain in the butt.

  • January 26, 2018 at 2:17 pm #101277
    Rich Harvey

    Participant

    Wow … that takes proofreading to a whole new level. “Oh, yeah, keep your eyes open for a few thousand missing words. Thanks!”

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