Placing text into indesign

[M.E.310814321c2q]

In placing text into an idesign book document I get this, or something like it. Mainly in contractions of all kinds. This is it: ,”Äô           Don't know how to get rid of it, what it is and why it is. Can someone help?

It happens placing from Word in Windows, Windows Notepad, Mac Pages and Mac Text Edit.

I am using Indesign in Mac OS Ventura. I think right now it is 13.5.1, something like that.

tanX in advance

[Mike Witherell]

When you click on File > Place, click on Show Import Options to bring up an intermediate dialog box. Make sure it is set correctly.

[M.E.310814321c2q]

Hi,.

When I place with Show Import Options, I get a window with very few choices and certainly not the ones I need to over-ride this problem. However, when I place as a Word .docx, the Options window that opens does give me the choices I need and thus, it is now placing properly. What I wondered about is this: I'm on Mac OS and placing from Text Edit as a plain text file doesn't work, placing from Pages doesn't work, and on my Windows, placing from Note Pad as plain text or from Ms Word, also doesn't work. I thought it would at least work from Pages or Text Edit on the Mac.

[Joel Cherney]

What option did you use to get it to place correctly? That could probably tell us what problem InDesign was having with the other formats. I mean, without looking at any of your files, I am 100% certain that Peter guessed correctly when he posted about it a week ago; it's a platform encoding issue. 

A raw text file created on a Mac viewed in TextEdit isn't identical to a raw text file created on a Windows box in Notepad, you know? They have different assumptions about how to encode the end of the line, hyphenation, and so on. The encoding problem going on right now is that it's not showing typographer's quotes correctly. I do not recall (it's been a while since I've seen this particular issue) but I think you have Windows-encoded typographer's quotes in your MacOS-encoded text file. Pages, I think, will display those quotes correctly but preserve source encoding? I'm not sure, it's been years since I had to use Pages.

But I do know that you can change the encoding that Text Edit uses to display a single file (so you could change encoding until you found the garbage apostrophes; then you'd know how InDesign was interpreting your placed files). Similarly, Notepad will let you save your text files with different encodings, but not the old ones like Win-1252 or Mac OS Roman, which I recall as being the encodings to really cause these apostrophe-drop issues.

I have to handle old multilngual data on a regular basis, so I really prefer Notepad++ for fixing encoding stuff:

If you were interested, we could absolutely do some experimentation to figure out how your file was encoded, and then resave it in such a way as to permanently fix the garbage-encoding typographer's quotes. It sounds like you fixed it yourself with Word, so it may be unnecessary, but these issues might crop up again in the future, especially if you never figure out how this particular character encoding problem was generated in the first place. 

[M.E.310814321c2q]

Hello
Initially all my files or docs were written in Word.
I believe I also had Word on my Mac but this was some years ago
I was putting together a book using Indesign on a Mac and Word was
also on that computer.
Then I moved back to the States with a Windows laptop that already
had Adobe apps on it along with Windows apps.

Seemed no problems I recall.
Now I have had to transfer Word docs to Indesign on both my Windows
and Mac OS and neither place correctly.
However, if I transfer the docs onto Mac OS with Indesign and place
them as .docx's they are placing fine because the Import Options window
I get allows me to check how they will be placed and that seems to be
working.

Although, I really don't know what the machine is doing.

[Barb Binder]

Hi @M.E.310814321c2q:

I would look closely at one of those specific strings in the Word (Notepad, Pages, Text Edit) documents. Maybe an unusual character was used for the contractions. If you can't see it, try retyping it and then place that file to see if that takes care of it. If you can figure it out, you can find/change the other occurences.

~Barb

[M.E.310814321c2q]

Hello Barb. How does one "look at a specific string" in my documents? I would have no idea what I would be looking at either way if it is code I would be looking at. I don't think there are any unusual characters in my contractions. Here are a few:  isn't   don't   didn't   haven't   won't   I'll   I've and so on.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can you post a screenshot?

Have you tried different / new document? Maybe this one is corrupted?

[M.E.310814321c2q]

I have re-written several paragraphs from my book and then created a new document, set up my styles source, (Paragraph & Character Styles), and then placed the new typewritten text. This I did in Text Edit in Mac OS Ventura. It still shows up. Before that, I copied and pasted my text from Word into Notepad in Windows and from Pages to Text Edit in Mac OS. To see if that would erase or somehow remove whatever this ,”Äô  represents. Also, I noticed that when I click on "Import Options" I get a very skeletal window that does not allow me to dismiss those kinds of things. At least from the image examples I have found online in tutorials. I wonder why my Indesign doesn't have much of a window of options to use or not use. I wonder what they sold me without telling me. I can post a screenshot from my Mac and not this Windows.

[J E L]

It's possible what is happening is that ,Äô’ is a representation of an unknown character, possibly an apostrophe, smart quote, percentage sign, or an em-dash; some special character that is getting corrupted during the copy and paste. I've seen this happen when website (such as a blog post) text is copied to a separate Word or text document and/or displayed incorrectly in a browser. Is there a specific place where this string is showing up in your text? If so, you may be able to run a find/replace search with the correct character. 

[M.E.310814321c2q]

I am not copying and pasting.
I am placing. If you are correct, why can't I use an apostrophe in Indesign
or an apostrophe in Word, Notepad, Text Edit or Pages?

Makes no sense. I thought Adobe was better and smarter than that.

What did you sell me?

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Sometimes, when preferences get corrupted - InDesign starts to behave strangely - that's why you should trash preferences. 

Or the file you are trying to place is corrupted. 

Or, as pointed out by @Peter Spier - something is wrong with the coding in this file.

[J E L]

@M.E.310814321c2q, I understand you are placing text. What I meant to indicate was that sometimes, cutting and pasting text from a website or other source into a Word document, and then trying to place that text into InDesign, you will see representations of unknown characters. I apologize for any confusion.

I'm not sure why you can't use an apostrophe in InDesign or any other text applications. It could have to do with the language (English or other?) fonts (which ones?), the paragraph and character styles you are trying to map to. Seeing screenshots or attaching your original documents so we can test on our side might help.

Please note, you have a lot of people here who are volunteers with an incredible amount of deep, historical knowledge about the software. We are genuinely trying to help you. We've asked several questions you haven't answered yet, so I'm hoping you have found your solution somewhere among all these replies or on your own.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Maybe you need to trash Preferences ?

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/reset-indesign-preferences-and-other-troubleshoo...

[Peter Spier]

This looks exactly like what used to happen in the bad old days when Mac and Windows used different font formats and mappings and files were moved cross-platform.

What fonts are involved?

[Willi Adelberger]

I would recommend to open the file in Word, type some words and delete them andresave it as docx again and use that.