Importing a Word document, InDesign 2023 corrupts the paragraph styes (badly)

[Alastair L]

I've ben using beta's for InDesign and other Adobe products for several years now bcause their products are so unreliable on Macs. I just tried to use InDesign 2023 on a spare mac, an M1 MBA and importing a Word Document (exported from Pages) into InDesign the mapping of Paragraph and Character styles into InDesign Para and Char styles got pretty badly borked up.

All the imported paragraph stlyes (~12 of them) had numerous coruptions of each style, but the corruptions were consistently the same on each style. InDesign added
i.   Keep Options > Start each new para on "a new page" 

ii.  A black border to each para style

iii. Black shading to each para style.

And that's what Ive discovered so far, possibly more borking.

I'm honestly wondering if Adboe have any QA departments of InDesign and Illustrator in existence any more because how major release software can be released without gettign checked for EVERY function that people use amazes me. THat is certainly what must be happening, there are so many appalingly job blocking bugs Adobe should be ashmaed. Adobe's lack of ability to ix bugs even when identified by some many users in Beta programs and their various feedback channels means that the code base itself is a stinking mess. I know that Adobe now has a common code base for Windows and Mac versions, including UI elements wrtting in Javascript of all bug ridden things and that could be where a lot of problems are coming from. Typically when applications are developed on Windows in C++ and ported to Mac there are a metric s-h-i-t-t-o-n-n-e of UI/UX bugs to iron out because they didn't use standard Apple frameworks to build the front end of the application.

We all know Adboe has preferenced PC users for decades, for one thing because they have less product offereings on PC to compete with in the DTP and film editting space than on Macs.  Its hard not to ask the question are Adobe delibrately shafting mac users, because that is what it has looked like for the three or more years.

[Derek Cross]

I've been using InDesign on a Mac since version 1, and I don't accept your assertions about InDesign and Adobe, some of which, are frankly absurd.

If you want to learn how to use MSWord documents with InDesign, you might consider looking at the excellent Linkedin Learning online video course "Smarter Workflows with InDesign and Word", you can get 30-days free access.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/smarter-workflows-with-indesign-and-word?trk=learning-serp_learnin...

[Alastair L]

thanks dude, I've been using it since v1 too, and Quark Xpres and Ready Set Go before that. I did my first DTP projects  in MacDraw for science subject lab reports while at school. 🙂 

I konw how to import a document and how to map stlyes.

[Eugene Tyson]

Report bugs or make a feature request

https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

[BobLevine]

So, you're designing in Pages and then saving as Word and then bringing that into InDesign and you think InDesign is the weak link?

Everything you're describing in your post are things I've seen with Word files saved from other applications such as Google Docs and Pages. If you need Word files, use Word.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

So, you're designing in Pages and then saving as Word and then bringing that into InDesign and you think InDesign is the weak link?

🙂

Word is a somewhat fragile format at best; it grows spines when it's an export from some third app like Pages, Docs, and even Acrobat.

I can't find anywhere that says ID is supposed to be Word-native. Just allowing of a very controlled import to give a structured starting point for ID formatting.

[Alastair L]

thanks for the smart arse responce.

it just so happens that I needed material that was previously marked up in Pages (for shraing as a group document) and so as to avoid marking up 1000 odd lines of text in any of 12 para styles and 6 char styles I wanted to import it. Since INDD doesn't import Pages documents i converted to MS Word. I checked and double checked in Word and none of thes layout issues were evident in the Word document. That makes the weakest link INDD.

[Alastair L]

thing about work arounds, I guess i could have used GREP to search for text of certain styles and remapped to my own InDesign Native styles. i was faster to just alter the styles InDesign created with 3 weird errors.

[Alastair L]

no edit on posts to fix tYpOs now, Adobe? have the children been put in charge?

[Alastair L]

previously I used a 3rd party plugin to manage wo way syncing of InDesign text with Word documents when I had to work with people using Word, I think it was the WordsFlow Pro plugin but I honestly forget which one it was. Wasn't cheap but worth the price in time saved and stress alleviated on my floor. what ever it was called it worked flawlessly syncying to and from Word documents.

My frustrations with InDesign are much more about continual introduction of bugs in annual/major code releases, rather than this pretty minor issue which I fixed in 10 minutes or so. I suffered the “case of the disappearing text” issue like so many others did for about a year before Adobe released a Beta that fixed it. The continual "our developers are working tirelessly on it, be patient, we've attmepted numerous fixes but it keeps reappearing" is frankly laughable and reflects an aging code base that needs to be completely refactored for modern operating systems and application production cycles. Adobe closed down the beta forums, presumably because so many users there had reached the conclusion that Adobe is in some kind of late-QuarkXpress mode and just don't care about their brand reputation or users any more. Offshoring their entire dev teams seems to be a part of that, though i can't be sure how much of it is off-shored. I've spoken to engineers in their off-shored teams about bugs for five years now. This is not getting better. Maybe I get more of the bugs than most? That's my milage anyhow.

[Alastair L]

p.s. I stopped liking MS Word in about 1990 or so… I'm no fan just forced to use it sometimes, in this case it was the only plausible way to get tagged text in without retagging 1000 odd styles.