Blank pages when adding content

[StudioSignal]

Hello everyone!

I'm editing a book in InDesign which was imported from a Word file.

While editing I ran accross a problem where continuing adding imported content just adds blank pages. I googled around and ran across this forum where I found a similar problem from 2017.

Following the issue posted there I checked Story editor and it shows content is there, but I am not getting any progress adding new pages, since they're just blank and I cant sellect anything on them.

I tried what I could with paragraph styles but I'm not that advanced of a user to solve the problem.

I'm 100% sure issue is previous Word editing and styles set there, but I have no idea how to resolve this and don't wanna start over since i'm about 80 pages in.

Can anyone give me some advice? @Barb Binder was helpful in the other thread I found, so maybe she can help me out here too.

Thanks in advance!

[jmlevy]

Can you post some screen shots of the blank pages showing hidden characters?

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Hi @StudioSignal:

I took a look at your files you sent via a PM and here's what I discovered: the large images embedded in the Word doc don't fit on a single page, so InDesign is giving up. 

Here are the details:

The last page has an empty frame but is overset—meaning there is more content that is not visible (and yes, it is visible in Story Editor view).;

When I enlarged the final frame, the next image was visible.

I scaled down the image, and the text after the image was then visible. 

From there, could restore the original frame size and then had to repeat the process for each page.

 

The process is tedious because there are so many oversized, anchored images but you can make it work. I think a quicker option—for next time at least—would be to gather the images into a folder, remove them from the Word doc or the InDesign doc and then place them all back in again. A little known trick about a Word .docx file is that it is a just a .zip file—if you change the .docx to .zip you can unzip the and all of the images will be in a single folder called Media.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions. 

~Barb 

[StudioSignal]

Thank you SO much Barb!

I can't believe it's such a simple sollution but I would have never guessed this could be an issue.

The Word file I received is overly complicated. I asked for raw text and images in a separate folder but client likes to make things their own way and make my life twice harder.

As long as I know the main issue is oversized images and how to work arround this I can manage the rest, even though its slightly more tedious. I know about the .zip trick and use it all the time, but I was hoping since client wanted to do "half the work", this would be easy. But why would things be easy if they don't have to be right? 🙂

Thanks again and have a nice day! 🙂

[Barb Binder]

Have a great day (night?), @StudioSignal!

~Barb