Issues while importing Word Documents (footnotes and special chars)

Question

Hello! I'm facing some issues regarding Word Importing into InDesign.

I have a .docx document, and I place it in my template. This approach loses some footnotes (Word has 393 footnotes, and INDD has 259).

Since this has happened to me before, I have a walkaround that is converting my .docx into a .doc file. When I do this, all the footnotes appear, but another issue appears, some special characters are not shown (they display as a little box where the character should be). This characters are simple dashes, and 3 dots characters. The odd thing is that when I import the the .docx, you can see them without any issues. I can't find a way to convert them back into a normal characters.

Any ideas on how to deal with this? We generally work with .docx files, so I would like to solve the issue of footnotes not appearing rather than the special characters, but both would help.

Are there any tips, changes or validations to the footnotes I should ask or add in the .docx files so that this issue is solved? I can't see anything odd in the footnotes.

I am using InDesign CC 2019.

Thanks!

Jongware · Answer

Even the newest version of InDesign keeps on having problems with Word documents. One of the things it cannot handle well (or at all, YMMV) is documents containing tracked changes -- see for instance the recent Some Numbers are missing while importing RTF into InDesign

So, my step #1 is to accept all tracked changes in Word and re-saving before importing.

If that does not work, find a Word macro to convert footnotes to endnotes; import into InDesign; convert endnotes to footnotes.

If that is too much extra work on a regular basis, indeed the 3rd (and usually final) attempt is to convert to .doc and use that.

The .doc format uses a slightly different character encoding than .docx (or maybe InDesign properly handles the latter but not the former) and instead of proper Unicode characters, it uses the now obsolete Latin1 Character Encoding for basic characters. Yes, it's the Revenge of The Microsoft Code Pages all over again! InDesign cannot deal with these and so you get the boxes for 'unknown characters'. But it should be consistent: a basic find-and-replace of each box with the proper character will fix it.

If you are on Windows, call up the Character Map and select a regular font such as Arial. In the "Character set" dropdown, select "Windows: Western". Now, for instance, if you find a box with a code '0x96', hover the mouse over the character map until you find it -- the characters are sorted by their Windows code but will actually display the Unicode as well:

Using Text Find/Change, change all "<0096>" to "<2013>"; rinse and repeat for all other boxes. If you need to do this a lot, you can use the standard FindChangeByList script for this as well!

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