Copy text from Indesign to other apps with formatting?

[DrewRothman]

I've been asked to send someone content from one of my documents via email. When I copy and paste the text out of InDesign into Word or into my email, all of the italics are lost and I have to re-apply them by hand. I even tried copying from the PDF export and I still lose the italics (even when using the 'Copy with Formatting' option). Is there a better method of copying a block of text from InDesign to other programs without the text format getting dropped? So far the only method I've found is to export the entire file as HTML and copy from there, but that's a little cumbersome for a few paragraphs.

[SJRiegel · Accepted solution]

You can export the text in Rich Text format.

You will have to do one story at a time; select all before choosing export.

[Derek Cross]

If you need to do this regularly, this may help https://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/indesign-downloads/textexporter-4/

It will export all stories of an InDesign document into a single file as an RTF, InDesign Tagged Text, or Text.

[DrewRothman]

Thanks guys! Those are good tips.

I volunteer doing the playbill layouts for a community theatre, and on occasion they'll have a bunch of returning actors in a new play and someone will say "can you pull the bios for these ten people and send them to me for editing." So I am pulling up several past documents and pulling out just a paragraph or two from each. While copy/paste would be way faster, the export as RTF seems to be a suitable workaround - certainly faster than re-italicizing all of the play titles in every bio by hand!

[winterm]

Hm, seems like OS and versions of apps involved matters. Just tried on pretty ancient config: Win7 + CS6 + Office 2003 + Windows Mail. No problems to copy/paste from InDesign directly - all formatting is retained.

[DrewRothman]

Interesting! Yeah, this is CC 2019 into the current edition of Word (office 365) or into the current version of Thunderbird mail. This is on Windows 10.

[BobLevine]

There are too many variables including the recipient email client.

My $0.02 worth: You're wasting your time and effort as you would be with anything like this.