From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Importing text - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Importing text

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- [Instructor] Okay, let's say you have a text file, such as this Word document, and you need to get this into InDesign. Now, the easiest method is just to select some text and copy and paste it. And while that does sometimes work fine, especially for small amounts of simple, unformatted text, I really do not recommend it for anything more than a paragraph or two. And I certainly wouldn't use copy and paste for any text that was formatted or included foreign language or special characters. I've just seen too many problems over the years with text showing up totally wrong after pasting it. Instead, I strongly recommend that you use the Place command in InDesign, it is far more reliable. Let me show you. I'll switch back to InDesign, and then I'll go to the File menu and choose Place, or you could press Cmd + D on the Mac or Ctrl + D on Windows. Now, I'm going to select that text file. Like I said, this is simply a Word document, but it could be a txt or an RTF file, and I'll click Open. Because I had no frame selected on my page, InDesign loads the place cursor with that story. Or if I had a blank text frame on this page, I could click on it to place a story into it. But in this case, there's no frame yet. So, to place this story inside my InDesign document, I'm going to move my cursor up to where the margin guides are. I'm looking for a subtle but important change, the tiny black arrow inside the cursor turns into a white arrow. You may have to squint to see it, but it's there. And the white cursor means that when I click, it's going to snap to the margin guides. So, I'll get as close as I can to those guides, but I don't need to worry about placing it exactly right. Now, I'll click and InDesign makes a text frame and flows the text into it. I should point out that after you place or paste text into InDesign, you may see this little gray box in the lower right corner of the text frame, it has a T with a little lightning bolt next to it. This is part of InDesign's Auto Style feature. InDesign is trying to be helpful, but don't click that or else it's going to remove all of your text formatting and try to apply its own styles based on some artificial intelligence. And the results are, well, they're not pretty. So, if you see that little gray box with a T, you can usually just ignore it. So, I got one frame full of text. You'll see that this is page 7 and the document ends there. However, I happen to know that this is a much longer story, this should have filled multiple pages. I really wish I could import the entire Word document at once. And fortunately, you can. Let me show you how. I'll undo that with a Cmd + Z or a Ctrl + Z on Windows, and that reloads the place cursor for me. Now, I'm going to place this txt file again, but this time with the Shift key held down, when you hold down the Shift key, the cursor changes a little bit, you get this kind of S-shaped arrow in there. And that indicates that when I click, it's going to flow all the text. So, once again, I get close to the margin guides, hold on the Shift key and then click. This time, InDesign not only imports that one page, but the whole story and it created a bunch of pages for me. And on each of those pages, it created a new text frame and then it threaded the text from one page to the next automatically. So, that Shift key modifier is really important when you're importing a long story. Now, there's one more thing I want to point out, let's jump to the next spread. Look at the formatting in here. It looks much nicer than it did in my Word processing program, right? Let me go back to Word and show you. See, here in Word, the formatting is very simple, which makes it easy to edit, but it's not very pretty. But here in InDesign, it looks different. How did that happen? Well, I'm going to be talking about paragraph styles and character styles in a later chapter, but I do want to point out now that if the styles are named exactly the same between Word and InDesign, then InDesign will throw away the original boring formatting and it'll use the formatting that's defined in InDesign instead. In fact, if I come over here and look at the Paragraph Styles panel in the dock, I can see a whole bunch of paragraph styles, and each of those is named exactly as they were in Word. Now, a moment ago, I mentioned something about threading, and if I click on one of these frames, you'll see these lines that are threaded from one frame to the next. What's that about? And how can you manually thread stories from one text frame to another? Well, that's what I'm going to cover in the next movie.

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