Placed text Footnotes references turn into forced line break

[wutbkk]

Hi all,

macOS Catalina, latest ID version

When placing Word Doc file into InDesign, some of the footnotes references get converted into forced line break, and the footnotes content do not show up at all. This happens with File -> Place : Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables. But if I copy the text from MS Word and then Paste into text frame in InDesign, it works correctly. Does anyone know how to troubleshoot? I suspect it's based from the messy styles from client side but I can't seem to find a solution on how to Place the MS Word doc file and have the footnotes get imported correctly.

I've attached the MS Word file and two screencaps showing the difference between placing the file and copy & paste. Some footnotes do get imported when placed; for example, footnote 12 from MS Word (...functional difficulty) gets placed into InDesign while footnotes 1-11 do not. I checked footnote 11 and 12 in MS Word, and they are using the same (overridden) style, so I do not know why footnote 12 gets placed when 11 wouldn't.

Appreciate any advice!

[sda47590707]

Hi,

I am experiencing the same problem with the note references changing to forced returns in InDesign when imported from a Word doc. It is only occasionally, most of the files that I import work perfectly. Did you ever find out what was causing the problem? I hope that you did.

Thanks!

[wutbkk]

Hi ya, it's been a while but since no one has replied me here with solution, I suspect I just ended up with doing things manually.

[Willi Adelberger · Accepted solution]

Resave the Word file as DOC before importing into InDesign.

[sda47590707]

And thank you Will! Resaving the .docx file to a .doc did the trick and all of the notes imported correctly! I am very grateful for the fix. Most of my projects are long documents with endnotes or footnotes and I rarely have any issues. It is good to know how to correct the problem when the notes import as forced returns.

[sda47590707]

Thank you for your reply! I have manually added the notes in a few documents over the years and that is definately no fun!

[Barb Binder]

@Willi Adelberger is correct, saving as .doc takes care of this, but that's new bug in InDesign. I have footnote-heavy documents and have never seen this happening. Please take a moment to report it—and reference this thread. https://indesign.uservoice.com

If you can come back and give us the link to the bug report, we can vote for it. Others will too, as they seek out an answer to the same issue.

~Barb

[telred18]

It's not really a new problem. I've had it for years but only occasionally. It must be something related to the structure of certain Word files as it's worst with those containing lots of anchored objects. I always save as RTF to fix it. See for example: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/probleme-num%C3%A9ros-de-r%C3%A9f%C3%A9rence-de-...