Text Not Showing in InDesign Document but Visible in Story Editor

[ellie_9176]

Hi all!

I placed a Word document into InDesign and it is not showing up on the actual document besides the first few pages. It is visible in Story Editor. I've tried creating a new document several times and it seems to be a recurring issue. Any ideas? Thank you! 

<Title renamed by MOD>

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi @ellie_9176,

Thank you for sharing your concern. I can understand how frustrating this must be. When text is visible in the Story Editor but not in the main layout, it often indicates an issue with text overflow or that the text frame is too small to display all the content.

Would you mind trying the below? 
1. Check for Overset Text: Look for a small red plus sign (+) at the bottom right corner of your text frame, indicating that there's more text than the frame can show. You can either expand the text frame or flow the text into a new one by clicking the red plus sign and placing the remaining text.

2. Make sure the text frame isn't hidden or placed on a non-visible layer. Also, ensure that the text color isn't set to [None] or the same as the background color.

3. If your document has multiple linked text frames, ensure they are all properly connected. You can do this by checking the flow indicators (the little boxes with arrows) in your text frames.

Additionally, please tell us about the InDesign version you are using and the details of the operating system. 

Please let me know if this resolves the issue, or if you need further assistance. We're here to help!

Thanks, 
Abhishek Rao  

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You almost certainly have a hidden code or a document glitch that is holding up the import

• Do a completely clean import using Place.
• Go to the very last character that imports, the end of the visible text.
• Tap Delete until the rest of the text appears (and probably continues flowing into more pages). It might be one tap, it mght be a dozen.

That deletes whatever Word file element is confusing ID. You'll need to review that and restore whatever characters, image, table etc. might have been deleted in the fix.

[ellie_9176]

Thank you!

This unfortunately didn't help, I deleted all the previous text and it still didn't show the rest of the text. There must be something really wrong, I've tried to create new documents several times and it just keeps freezing my computer and forcing me to restart. I appreciate your help though!

[ellie_9176 · Accepted solution]

Update: I resaved the word document and replaced it and that worked so it must have been an issue with the original word document. Thanks again!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

That's Step 2. Word docs can be "broken" in lots of ways, starting with being saved by an alternate tool like Google Docs or Pages. None of those tools quite saves in perfect Word format and InDesign often has problems with them. The solution is to open them in a genuine copy of Word and re-save them.

The other way Word docs can be plagued is by a build up of "junk" — undo information, other working data — that can bloat a simple text file to a megabyte or more. That junk can confuse ID as well. The solution there is to do a Save-As under a new name, which often purges the junk, or to save as RTF, then reopen and save as a Word format.

The general solution when a Word file won't import right, especially if footnotes or end notes are involved, is to open it and Save-As to a new name in .DOC, .DOCX and .RTF formats. One of those is almost certain to import well.

But, darn. That 'delete' trick works quite often and looks like pure magic when it does. 🙂