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Participant
May 16, 2013
Answered

Loosing Footnotes when placing word in InDesign

  • May 16, 2013
  • 3 replies
  • 31802 views

Hi everyone,

I seem to have a problem that has been discussed before, but there is no suitable answer with a real solution.

When importing (placing) a word file (.rtf), some of the notes are misplaced, namely the number of the footnote looks like a spuare with a pink highlight, while the text of the note is moved to the next footnote, misplacing the footnotes from their proper location.

Does anyone have a solution? Many have had this problem, but I couldn't find any real solutions.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer

Hi Tim,
just a quick word to give you all my love for this tip.

I saved my word document as you said and suddently all my footnotes were nicely imported in my inDesign doc (cc 2015.4).
You saved my night

Thanks again !
antoine

3 replies

Participant
December 26, 2015

I just encountered the footnotes from Word import problem in a most embarrassing way--it was brought to my attention by an irate author demanding to know why I deleted most of her notes. The first 23 callouts and notes in a book chapter were deleted, but the remaining seven came through. I opened the original docx file in Word 2011 (mac) and saved it as Word 97-2004.doc. I imported this file into InDesign CC and all of the notes came through. I have no idea whether this will work every time, but you might find it worth a try.

BobLevine
Community Expert
Community Expert
December 26, 2015

What version of InDesign?

Participant
December 26, 2015

CC release 2015.2, build 11.2.0.99. I was running the version that was current in early Nov. when I had the import problem.

Participant
December 4, 2015

Dear All, 

I just found out that if you save word dox file to docx format all footnotes come in place.

Best regards


Participant
February 15, 2016

This is working for me!

After years of having to manually enter footnotes in cyrillic books, this is awesome!

Thank you so much!

Marvest
Inspiring
May 16, 2013

Enable Preflight: Windows/Output/Preflight and see if there's a description of an error. That might give you a clue.

Participant
May 22, 2013

Hi,

Thanks for the answer, but it doesn't detect it as a problem.

However, I found some other advices on other forums, wich led me to reinstall older versions of InDesign. The Word file seemed to work fine when placed in the same indd file but opened in InDesign 4. Afterwards I just saved the file, opened it in ID 5.5 and it was fine.

This just might be the solution. It seems there is a bug in ID Cs 5.5. I hope it will work on other problem files too.

Participant
May 24, 2013

Still having problems. They are not so many, but still no complete soluntion.

Anyone?