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M
M.E.310814321c2q
Known Participant
August 31, 2023
Pregunta

Placing text into indesign

  • August 31, 2023
  • 5 respuestas
  • 960 visualizaciones

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

Este tema ha sido cerrado para respuestas.

5 respuestas

Willi Adelberger
Community Expert
Willi AdelbergerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 1, 2023

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

    Peter Spier
    Community Expert
    Peter SpierCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 31, 2023

    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?

      Robert at ID-Tasker
      Robert at ID-Tasker
      Legend
      August 31, 2023

      Can you post a screenshot?

       

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

       

      M
      M.E.310814321c2qAutor
      Known Participant
      August 31, 2023

      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
      Community Expert
      J E LCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      August 31, 2023

      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. 

      Barb Binder
      Community Expert
      Barb BinderCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      August 31, 2023

      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

      ~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
      M
      M.E.310814321c2qAutor
      Known Participant
      August 31, 2023

      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.

      Mike Witherell
      Community Expert
      Mike WitherellCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      August 31, 2023

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

      Mike Witherell
      M
      M.E.310814321c2qAutor
      Known Participant
      September 8, 2023

      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
      Community Expert
      Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      September 8, 2023

      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. 

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