Packaging files with periods in name, name gets cut off

[serifina7]

Hi! I would appreciate your help...

My office uses a file naming convention that includes multiple numbers with periods between them. This seems to cause InDesign to truncate the name when packaging. I have to enter it manually in the packaging dialogue box in order to get the full name on the packaged folder. Other people in the office do not want to change from periods to hyphens. I'm curious if anyone has other workarounds for the packaging issue, which is a huge annoyance when dealing with large numbers of files.  

[JonathanArias]

Period are only meant to go before the file type. Ex: .pdf, .jpg, and so on. Yes, if you use periods in file names you will have issues. That is a horrible system. If they don't want to change their naming system than issues and errors will not change. I am surprise you don't have other issues. 

[Benjamin Richards - RRD]

Thanks, Jonathan—this InDesign bug has been bothering me for several years now. I'm not sure if by "horrible system" you're referring to wayward periods in filenames or to InDesign itself, but I frequently work with files that have page dimensions as part of the filename, so a filename with "8.5x11" in it is not uncommon. Still no reason for InDesign to force the user to hand-key the remainder of the filename when packaging.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The horrible system is nothing to do with InDesign. Periods are among the few universal "do not use" symbols in file naming. Some platforms and systems will tolerate them, but their function as filename component separators (e.g. 'filename [dot] txt') is basic.

As JA says, I am surprised your company doesn't have all kinds of file management and app incompatibility problems. There is no solution but to stop using periods in filenames, along with most other punctuation. Dashes and underscores are the only truly universal separators tolerated in file names.

[leo.r]

This happens because InDesign calls a function to "remove extension from file name" (to put it in simple terms).

This function, however, isn't exactly sophisticated: it just considers 'extension' anything after the last dot in the file name.

In the case of packaging it's indeed an obvious bug as the source InDesign file already has the ".indd" extension applied. So it appears that somewhere under the hood InDesign grabs the file name without the "indd" extension, and then calls that function - which removes whatever is after the last dot in the file name. 

Or maybe it calls this function twice by mistake (which first removes "indd", then removes the actual name part after the last dot).

You can witness this effect more obviously when opening an IDML file. When you open IDML, it opens in InDesign without any file extension at all. So when you save it, anything after the last dot will be also removed in the Save dialog (as InDesign thinks it's the file extension):

I'm also inclined to consider it a bug (provided we're dealing with file names where file extension is applied). A dot in the file name can be often legitimate. This problem should only happen when the file extension isn't applied at all (which isn't the case we discuss here).

[Benjamin Richards - RRD]

@leo.r Thank you for providing that detailed explanation. 

@James Gifford—NitroPress I appreciate your input as well. My impression over recent years has been that periods are tolerated in most modern file systems (IIRC, MacOS even allows forward slashes in file/folder names (it just changes it under the hood)). 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

That's the danger of using or assuming an extended character set for filenames: while each platform allows it to some extent, and it's rare to find unusual or unexpected incompatibilities, there is simply no guarantee that anything but [A-Z, a-z, 0-9, -, _ ] will be read correctly by all apps on all networks using all protocols. This is a problem with most punctuation; it's a headache most European users have had to cope with in respect to accented characters.

Periods in particular are 'separators' under most systems and putting more than one in a filename is likely to cause problems, sooner or later. Question marks and 'bangs,' ditto. And, of course, when messy filenames end up as part of a URL... ooh, look at the pretty sparks.

InDesign isn't really faulty or bugged in the respect you ran into; it's simply being more rigid and strict about separating the overall filename components, and doesn't like those extra "name components."

It's good practice to stay with basic alphanum characters in filenames, even in 2023.