Losing footnotes when importing a Word document

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

On a couple of occasions recently, after importing a Word document, I've discovered that some (but not all) of the footnotes were missing. Forced line breaks occured where the footnote markers used to be.

The fact that many of the original footnotes are retained is insidious — if they were all missing a script could put them back quite easily.

Has anyone else had this problem? Thanks in advance — Jeremy

[Eugene Tyson]

How are you bringing it in?

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/importing-word-doc-with-footnotes/td-p/10499066

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

I brought it in using "Place" and a preset which I've used many times before. I tried "Place" without the preset, but the missing footnotes are still missing!

[Robert at ID-Tasker · Accepted solution]

Maybe try RTF instead of DOC(X/M) ?

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

Aha! That worked — all 254 footnotes are importred, unlike the 232 that were imported with Word. Unfortunately, I've already done so much work on the InDesign document from Word that I'll probably just cut and paste the 22 missing footnotes. It's a pain, but a bit easier than starting over. Thanks! From now on, I'll be importing RTF only, and I'll be avoiding Word with even greater distaste than before.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

DOC(X/M) is Microsoft's proprietary format - RTF is open standard.

[Eugene Tyson]

Yeh it's a weird format I get many issues using docx - and often save as a plain .doc

.docx is a zip file, you can change the extension to .zip and then unzip the file and edit the xml/media etc. folders in there. 

Not sure what the issue is - but clearly Indesign is unable to unravel all within the .docx file for whatever reason. 

I've often opened .docx files on a Mac and words are in bold/italic fonts - but don't display as bold/italic on Mac Word - but import to InDesign fine.
And I've seen the opposite, bold/italic etc. clearly in Mac MS Word - and then import to InDesign and it loses the bold/italic etc.

Saving to a different format seems to be a solution when it's .docx. 

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

That's good to know, thanks! I'm a fan of XML and look forward to taking my next docx document apart!

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

If you export your INDD document as IDML - it's also a ZIPed package full of goodies. 

[Barb Binder]

@Jeremy bowmangraphics:

I'm curious what version of InDesign this is happening in. Would you mind letting us know?

~Barb

[Jeremy bowmangraphics]

I've using 18.5 × 64 in Windows 11. But the very same thing happened about a month ago, and I may have been using an earlier version then. As a rule, I use the latest version available.

[Barb Binder]

Thank you for sharing the version(s). This used to happen with some regularity about five years ago or so, but I haven't run into it lately. It's unsettling to hear that it is back, but also good to know so that I can check the final note numbers after importing but before formatting.

~Barb