TextPad - InDesign workflow?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 25, 2023
2 replies
264 views

Help me, InDesign community, with your insight and guidance on a workflow that involves TextPad. What's that like? Is it doable? (Doable easy? Or a winding road?) Translatable to/with XML? Would InCopy be beneficial or superfluous?

Looking forward to anyone's experience and sharing of resources on this subject. And, so there's no misunderstand, the writer works with TextPad—thousands of pages, markups and all. I point this out to ward off responses like, "Why don't you just use Word?"

Thanks in advance.

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Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

Ask writer to give you DOC or RTF.

InCopy would be better - but isn't free.

Steve Werner

Community Expert

Do you have a copy of TextPad? Can it be exported to Word format? It's a little unclear how you are planning to interact with your client: Can you clarify?

miromontiAuthor

Inspiring

I don't use TextPad — it's Windows-only and I'm on MacOS. The biggest hurdle is that the writer's documents has markup tags all over. They represent styles and other builds that's similar to HTML and I wonder how translatable they are to XML. Or, even better, that they are XML and named differently on TextPad.

As all the copy is "styled" by way of tags, the hurdle is to translate every paragraph, character, table, etc. Whether that text is handed to me as whatever format — Word, RTF, etc. — or the writer interacts with InCopy, we want InDesign or InCopy to translate those tags. With thousands of pages of copy, we can't waste time manually (re)applying styles, rebuilding tables, and so on.

I should just ask for a page of text and import as XML and see what happens. But if that fails, what are my alternatives?

That's the crux of my query. Beyond that, any experience that anyone wants to share about their TextPad–InDesign workflow would also be appreciated.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

If everything is "tagged" - then it would be extremely easy to write a converter - or even use my free version of the ID-Tasker - unfortunately, I'm on a PC so can't help you with a script that would work directly in the InDesign on Mac.

But ... you could try to do multiple Search&Replace to at least apply Char / Para Styles.

To ease the job - you could use FindChangeByList script that is included with the InDesign.

If you need more help - you would need to show me / us some example of the raw material - how those tags looks like.

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