Hot Stuff
Win Suitcase Fusion 4 from Extensis!
Enter now to win!
Make Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign Get Along
Death, taxes, and importing Word files into InDesign: They’re all inevitable. I can’t help with the first two, but here’s how to make the best of the third.
Written by Pariah Burke on July 22, 2010
Related Articles
Related Reading
This article is excerpted from the April/May 2010 issue of InDesign Magazine (#34). Subscribe to InDesign Magazine.
Microsoft Word is the de facto standard word processor. That means that the majority of the text for our layouts arrives in the form of Word documents. Ugh!
Still, with a little knowledge and a decent strategy, importing and styling copy from Word needn’t be arduous or tedious. I’ll show you how to be productive despite the software.
In this article's first section, "Getting the Best Import," I'll help you get a Word text import that maximizes compatibility with your InDesign document and minimizes your manual cleanup.
The second, section, "Cleaning Up a Placed Word File," solves problems like two hyphens instead of an em dash, spaces immediately before a carriage return, tabs instead of paragraph indents, and much more.
To read the whole article as a PDF, click on the image below.
Share:
We Built Our Own Tool To Fix This
We got tired of this and developed FormatStripper, which removes all formatting information from MS Word documents, Html, Email, RichText and Text files, resulting in clean standard ASCII that can be saved as a TXT file, or copied into the System Clipboard for pasting into a separate layout tool, such as Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, FrontPage, etc. In fact, FormatStripper's native output can be used by any layout or design tool that can import plain text. No cpst test drive, at http://www.futurewaredc.com/formatstripper