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H_Bert_1
H_Bert_1
Inspiring
February 9, 2023
Question

Peculiarities with footnotes/references when importing an RTF

  • February 9, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 364 views

Hi, don't know if anyone else has encountered any oddness with this recently? For a long time the more reliable option for a document with footnotes seemed to be to import from an RTF rather than a Word doc. However, I tried one this week and the footnotes, plus the paragraph text following their reference points in the main body, came through bizarrely scrambled. Footnotes in different order, the wrong text dropping in after their reference points in the para. Brought it in again from the original .Doc and it behaved itself properly. Can anyone shed any light on this? 

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    2 replies

    Peter Kahrel
    Community Expert
    Peter KahrelCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 9, 2023

    Same experience as Ariel, though he seems to have had more luck with importing footnotes. In the (very many) .doc files I placed in InDesign I almost always had problems with the footnotes. Especially when the file contained one or more tables. I've experimented with rtf but that didn't improve things. InDesign's Word import filter is notorious.

      James Gifford—NitroPress
      James Gifford—NitroPress
      Legend
      February 9, 2023

      FWIW, I'd point the finger (or tilt the pointer) more to Word's issues. There are many undocumented and semi-documented and thus unaddressed issues between the many versions on two platforms, and it takes a mighty conversion program to address them all. Footnotes and endnotes are a headache even within Word, and trying to import them into any other app has always been a headache.

       

      My usual solution is the save to RTF/open as DOCX "purge," which almost always lets me get a clean import.

       

      TᴀW
      TᴀW
      Legend
      February 9, 2023

      Can't shed any light, except that I always import specifically .doc files (not .docx), with loads of footnotes and Hebrew, and it seems to work well.

      This week, for the first time in a long time, I was importing a Word doc with a table (no footnotes, no RTL) and the formatting was screwed up slightly. Converting to RTF and importing that fixed it.

      But on the whole, .doc works fine for me.

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