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Question

Prevent three dots replacement with ellipsis

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 12, 2021
5 replies
6556 views

Hi,

I am copying some text outside of InDesign and pasting it into InDesign document while keeping the formatting. The problem is that all instances of 3 dots are being replaced with ellipsis and formatting changes too (for example font). How to prevent this?

Regards,

Daniel

This topic has been closed for replies.

pixxxelschubser

Community Expert

I did something similar a few years ago. But with plain text and a combination of character and paragraph formats with grep styles.

It requires a lot of prep work, but after that you can have many unformatted codes automatically formatted in InDesign.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Try this: create a new ID document and place the whole Word doc in it. Cut and paste from that.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

That, I think, may be the best suggestion.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

Try Edit / Paste Without Formatting.

It might keep your characters as they were in the original source Word document.

FYI, Word does automatically swap out 3 periods . . . for the elipsis character … (Unicode 2026). That can be changed in Word's Options in the AutoCorrection section. Word could be changing the content just as you're copying/pasting to InDesign.

As far as I know, InDesign doesn't autocorrect three periods so I, too, don't think this is an InDesign problem.

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

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__Daniel__Author

Known Participant

Can't really imagine setting up the colors for all of the code blocks in InDesign:

So this is not an option.

As for autocorrect - I answered this under some other comments, but the issue occurs only when I paste into InDesign and only from MS Word (if I paste anywhere else there are 3 dots retained, same if I paste them copied from other source like Wordpad). Also, it stopped replacing them with ellipsis, but resets the style to the default style just for these dots:

Word:

InDesign (after pasting):

Previously they were replaced with ellipsis, but it has changed for some reason and now only the style gets set to teh default one.

Thank you

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__Daniel__Author

Known Participant

Additionally, I have a paragraph style created. I called it "Code". It sets the font to Consolas, size to 11, etc. Even if I appy it, the font does not change and stays Times New Roman for these dots. I need to apply character style.

I'm trying to "fix" it to not make a mistake and leave it somewhere and save myself many more clicks.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

InDesign doesn't do this by default. It's probably happening in the word processing program (presumedly the source).

If from Word, go to Option > Proofing > and turn off auto-correct or remove the ellipses conversion.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

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__Daniel__Author

Known Participant

Hmmm,

First, it's indeed MS Word.

I started experimenting and if I copy it from MS Word and paste anywhere, like Wordpad, Notepad, etc, it;s ok, only InDesign shows ellipsis (and also changes font from Consolas to Times New Roman, or, to be more precise, changes style to the default one).

I also tried to copy from otehr sources, including, for example, Wordpad (to keep RTF format) and it does not do that.

It seems to be only MS Word to InDesign.

I tried to disable autocorrect, but this changed nothing.

BobLevine

Community Expert

You are keeping the formatting which means you are keeping anything that Word does to your text. If you look at Word and type three dots in the text flow and go back to select it, you'll see it's been automatically formatted as a single character.

This is certainly not an InDesign issue and quite frankly, I fail to see how this is a bad thing anyway.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Where are you copying the text from?

It should copy in exactly what's there.

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__Daniel__Author

Known Participant

I'm copying from MS Word.

BobLevine

Community Expert

This originally is a Google Document downloaded in the docx format and opened with Word. I do not attempt to set colors in these code parts by hand (it's called syntax highlightinh). It's take me years to do for the whole book (over 600 pages). We used something to output formatted text (a custom color scheme in Sublime Text + some plugin).

Either way, the book is a thing for over a year now. What I'm doing right now is I'm updating our book. So I need to copy and paste parts. I need to do this so many times that I would rather not need to do any additional steps.

> I am surprised you can make it work at all, much less with a few glitches of color, font etc.
Well, I'm not. That's how rich text editors work - you can copy and paste text between them. InDesign, however, randomly resets either font or color while the same text pasted into other RTF editors looks exactly as it should.

> There are simply too many embedded codes in Word material to be assured they'll neatly paste or drop away on paste.

This sounds so odd. So there are too many for InDesign? I already pasted multi-page code blocks. It's just the same thing like these 3 dots or digit 0 that get's reset font. For teh original book we have been using File -Place, but, for obvious (I hope) reasons it does not make sense now (while I need to update many parts of the book).

So, at the moment, I want to know how to prevent InDesign from resetting teh font if possible. I discovered that if I paste coped formatted block into Wordpad, then copy it there and paste into InDesign, it looks ok. I just don't want to waste yet additional time to fight with odd things (this is not the only thing in InDesign that I had to find a "workflow" for).

Thank you.

That adds a whole new layer of garbage to the file. If you want to do this as painlessly as possible, copy/paste to a text file and then to InDesign.

If you're expecting anyone to come up with a totally painless way of handling this, I'm afraid you're going to be in for a long wait.

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