Participant

Question

InDesign Layout

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
May 24, 2021
5 replies
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Hello Everyone,

I was asked to extract text from an InDesign layout into a Word document. Is this possible without exporting as a PDF first?

Thanks!

Stephanie

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J E L

Community Expert

Assuming you want to go back to Word to do text editing and strip out any styling (not sure why else you would need to do this), I think it will be easier converting a PDF to Word, especially if the file has a lot of unlinked text boxes. Depending on how long the text is and how heavily the fonts have been designed, you could create a copy of the InDesign file and globally replace the fonts with something generic to easily identify headlines, running text, and so on to get the text as simple-looking as possible. Then, export the file to a PDF but choose export (don’t use a PDF preset) and save as type PDF (Print). In the preset box, on the Compression tab, be sure that “Compress Text and Line Art” is NOT checked. Once you open the PDF in Acrobat you can save as a Word document without rendering the text as readable. In Word, you'll have some clean up to do depending on the text boxes (which will be converted to section breaks in some cases). I also note there are some paid plug-ins that attempt to do this back conversion that might be worth looking into if this is a time intensive request. Happy to take a look at what you have if I can help!

Stephanie000Author

Participant

Thank you so much for your help.

Exporting the PDF and then exporting to a word doc from acrobat was my first choice. But the word doc still was messy and needed some cleaning up to do as you mentioned.

Then I was told by a higher up at work that it was easier and faster to extract right out of Indesign, this didn't make much sense to me because of all the title frames, subhead frames, and text frames being used. Not every text frame is threaded, (which does not allow you to select all of the text at once). This seems like it would take more time to extract using the Export>Rich Text Format method for each selected text frame.

I normally don't need to do this, but you are correct that the text needed some more editing and they prefered a word document.

Thank you for the info on plug-ins, I was starting to look into them as well.

Thanks again,

Much appreciated.

J E L

Community Expert

My pleasure. Thank you for sharing here, too, as it always helps others. I often tell clients that once text goes into InDesign, it’s not going to be easy to go back to Word for editing! I have done a lot of PDF to Word conversions, however, and am pretty fast at it now after discovering tricks to getting back to beautiful looking plain text for editing. I use the “more” options in Word’s Find and Replace dialogue box and the “special” character choices are also helpful.

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @Stephanie000:

Is it possible to thread everything with different paragraph styles and header styles ec?

Certainly, long documents with text that runs continuously can and should be in threaded text frames, and yes, you can assign paragraph and character styles.

Just clarifying the use of "header" though. The term header typically refers to a running head (repeating at the top or bottom of most pages) vs. a heading which refers to the heads (aka titles, subheads) that appear within the body of the document. Headers go in their own frames. Headings are normally integrated in the body of the text within the threaded frames.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Barb Binder

Community Expert

But the text is in seperate text boxes including titles and headers. Is there a way to select the entire layout and export it into RTF?

Not unless the frames are threaded. If they are not threaded and you want one Word doc, you are back to creating the PDF and exporting from there.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

Another good reason why we designers should thread our stories from the headings to the end in a series of threaded text frames. So many advantages, this is just one!

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

Stephanie000Author

Participant

Is it possible to thread everything with different paragraph styles and header styles ec?

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

Select the text.

File / Export

Select RTF, which is a generic word processing format that can be opened in Word, GoogleDocs, etc.

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |