Problem with footnote imports from MS Word into InDesign CS5.5
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- This topic has 5 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 8 months ago by
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When I imported a MS Word document (an important report for my client) into InDesign CS5.5 the majority of the footnotes didn’t get imported at all.
Having browsed for solutions to this problem, I tried saving the Word doc as an RTF file before importing it. Now the footnotes all imported! But, horror, several pages of the InDesign document were “frozen”, as if they were a screenshot. I could not make any selections (and hence no formatting) whatsoever. So my InDesign file was useless. I repeated the exercise three or four times just to check this wasn’t a freak occurrence but each attempt reproduced the problem. It was real. In the end, because my deadline allowed no more troubleshooting, I resorted to a cumbersome workaround of importing the Word document as it was (not as an RTF file) then manually inserting each footnote. Yikes! I don’t fancy doing that again! And I will have other similar reports coming my way.
So: does anybody know how to get around the problem? Is this an actual known bug, or is it just ME? Might it be to do with the InDesign, OS or Word version that I use?
MacBook Pro / OSX 10.8.5
InDesign CS5.5
MS Word for Mac 2011 14.1.0 (the original Word doc had been created in Windows)Suggestions eagerly and gratefully received!
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ID’s problem importing footnotes from MS Word has been discussed extensively over on the Adobe InDesign forums. Jongware, one of the more useful contributors there, wrote a nifty Javascript as a workaround, allowing one to import and MS Word file with endnotes and convert them all to footnotes once in InDesign. Note that ID doesn’t “do” endnotes itself, merely stacking them at the end when, thus bypassing the problems importing footnotes; meanwhile, conversion between endnotes and footnotes is pretty simple in MS Word. The script is available at comment #6 <https://forums.adobe.com/message/5399471#5399471>, thoughI’d also check the comments.
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Thank you very much for your reply! Now all I have to do is figure out how to do the footnote to endnote conversion in Word and how to run scripts in InDesign.
I’ve found some instructions, which I will follow:
WORD: https://office.microsoft.com/en-001/mac-word-help/convert-footnotes-to-endnotes-HA102929530.aspx
INDESIGN: https://creativepro.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign.php -
Hello again. As you gather from my last post I am a scripts newbie. After the useful reply above, I easily did the footnote to endnote conversion in Word. But even after a lot of googling and forum-research I have not been able to run the script successfully.
I copied the script from the forum into Text Edit and saved it in the scripts panel with a jsx extension (I’m ASSUMING it’s a Java script? Maybe this is my error?). I then created a new InDesign doc and placed the endnote-jammed Word document.
The script was visible in the scripts panel and I could start it, but I immediately got a runtime error. “JavaScript Error! Error Number: 8, Error String: Syntax error, Engine: main, File: /Applications/Adobe InDesign CS5.5/Scripts/Scripts Panel/Convert Endnotes to Footnotes.jsx, Line 1/…/”
Any ideas? Many thanks!
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Would like to report that the problem has been resolved. The initial issue was that I hadn’t saved the script as plain text, since – I know now – TextEdit uses rtf as its default format.
Once the script file was correctly saved, I encountered some other problems running the script. These were eventually resolved by converting the Word doc into rtf before importing it.
For full details:
https://forums.adobe.com/message/6124776
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Just in case if there is anybody still struggling with this problem (I’m sure there is). I hate the very idea of writing a code, especially to solve such a trivial problem. The easiest and 100% effective way is to save your doc or docx file as rtf. Now place the newborn rtf file into your publication using whatever way (I prefer drag and drop), and voila! The naughty text appears with all the footnotes right in their places, no crossed squares and pink spots any more.
BTW: my setup is Win7/CS6, but I don’t think that this combination has any special advantages.
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