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• • June 2, 2015 at 1:42 pm #75772
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I received a MS Word document in docx for publication. I saved the document as a doc file and then placed the file into ID CS5. It seemed to flow in quietly. I went ahead with some picture placement and formatting for ultimate booklet publication, saved my work and then exported it to pdf for review by the author and others.
    The result was unexpected. Portions of sentences were bolded, along with a large number of commas and periods in bold. There was also some random underlining of single letters. In a 50 page document, there were few pages without some bolding.
    The font used was Times New Roman.If I selected a bold period, CS5 showed that it was TNR bold and could be removed by selecting TNR regular.
    After several passes through the review process, I “think” that we have gotten them all out.

    What was going on? Should I have saved the MS Word file to RTF?

  • June 3, 2015 at 10:31 am #75800
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Word files can be a pain. Were the items bold in the Word file, or were they all just regular roman? I know that sometimes authors and editors do crazy stuff in Word files, and I usually have to scroll through the whole thing to check on things. Underscored, bold, or italic punctuation is not uncommon.

    Sometimes things can go buggy when downsaving from .docx to .doc.

    I’m not sure about downsaving to .rtf. I had some issues a while back with saving as rtf files (though in that instance I was saving an InDesign file as .rtf for a client). We had basically done keystrokes for them using xTags. We flowed the file into an ID file, and then saved as .rtf so the designer could flow the file in. For some reason, the rtf file was over-riding ID’s style sheets so far as spacing and leading and stuff). So I’ve kept away from .rtf personally.

    But you might not have a problem saving directly from word to .rtf, though it’s possible some things could change. I guess you’ll need to experiment.

  • June 4, 2015 at 5:49 am #75811
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    The original Word file seemed clean. It “might” have had the odd bold period that I missed on my original “read through” but it certainly did not have half a sentence in regular and the rest in bold, which popped up in the ID file.

    Perhaps it is simply a “feature” of downsaving from docx to doc.

    Thanks for the comments on rtf.

    It was suggested to me that perhaps flowing the word file into ID and then saving it as “tagged text” might help. Any thoughts?

    • June 4, 2015 at 9:08 am #75827
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      I think all that will do is export the stuff that is wrong. It’s still going to flow in originaly and you’re going to have that bold stuff from the Word file.

      I’m thinking the problem was due to downsaving. It’s also possible that different fonts were used in the Word file. I know I’ve received Word files where Calibri is used, as well as Times, Courier, etc. And sometimes they use character styles. Sometimes those combinations wreak havoc when I run my macros.

      I usually don’t import Word files into InDesign. We run macros to capture the italic, bold, small caps, superiors, etc., and tag it. Then we save as a .txt file and import that.

  • June 6, 2015 at 6:26 am #75864
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I’ll try using the txt approach next time (which will be soon).

    I suppose that I could create a Grep Find/Change that would work on the punctuation once the file had been flowed into ID. Might be worth a try,

    Thanks for your experience.

    • June 6, 2015 at 7:32 am #75865
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Good luck. You can probably write a simple macro that will capture and tag things like italic and bold, small caps, superiors, etc.

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