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This article is from June 29, 2010, and is no longer current.
When Pasting Text from Word Turns It into an Image in InDesign
Stanford wrote:
I’m trying to paste text from Word 2008 for Mac into InDesign CS5. When I do, the text comes in as an image, not editable text. I cannot seem to get around this, and the Paste without Formatting option is grayed out. I’ve used InDesign since 2003, and I’ve never seen this, especially since it’s just text, not a graphic, in Word.
You know, this started happening to me, too! Honestly, I’m not sure when it started. But now it appears to be an epidemic!
However, I have discovered a workaround: If you paste with nothing selected in InDesign, you get an image of text. If you create a text frame and paste into it, you get normal text.
(Unfortunately, if you paste once and get a graphic, and then create a text frame and paste into it, you still get a graphic. I think that when you paste the first time, the clipboard gets “solidified” into a graphic form and won’t change back. So you would need to go back to Word and select the text again.)
Why the change? Was it Word? I don’t think it’s version CS5, as this happens to me in CS4, too. Or was it my long-overdue upgrade to Snow Leopard? No, it appears to be problematic in 10.5.8, too. I still suspect the operating system.
That said, my (somewhat limited) understanding is that when you Copy something to the clipboard, the program (Word or whatever else you’re using) puts a list of “file types” that it supports up there. Then, when you switch to a different program and Paste, the target program looks at the list and chooses which format it wants to use. If that’s the case (any programmers want to weigh in?) then it actually might just be InDesign requesting the wrong thing.
If anyone knows a way to tell Word to stop putting the PNG up on the clipboard (or to tell InDesign to stop grabbing it), that’d be very interesting.
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A workaround would be to have another text editor open and you could copy and paste from word into the text editor and then copy from the text editor into InDesign.
Would it help if you choose paste without formatting inside InDesign?
We got all kinds of copy/paste weirdness when Office 2008 arrived. The other big one was Excel or Powerpoint charts pasting into Illustrator as a PNG instead of editable shapes, but I think an update fixed that. (Office? Illustrator? Who knows?)
FWIW, I’m getting the same results as David in CS3 on 10.4.11 on this old G5. Paste into a text box is fine; anything else is a PNG.
James: Unfortunately, Paste without Formatting only applies to text copied from another InDesign document. (And the Preference for pasting with or without formatting makes no difference here.)
G’day
Windows does the clipboard format thing you describe (multiple formats), but I have no idea about OSX.
If I get this, I sigh, open any dialog (Find, for example), and paste in there. Then re-select all, cut, close, and hey! unformatted text!
(You have to use a dialog because most of the fields in the Control panel and such cannot accept long swaths of text.)
G’day
I’m running CS4. Had no problem whatsoever until I upgraded to Word for Mac 2008 a month ago and noticed the problem immediately after. Have tried every permutation of the clipboard handling preference in Indesign that I could think of to no avail and am now working my through all the settings in Word 2008.
It was with great relief that I accidentally stumbled on the “make sure you paste into a text frame” workaround a couple of weeks ago.
@ James
I’d tried the copy and paste into Text Edit and found that sometimes I’d end up with an image in Text Edit and other times with text. Bizarre.
Cheers, Gobit
@ Gobit – in text edit if you change the format to “make plain text” it might come in as text instead of an image.
Searching around on the web, it seems like this is also an issue with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and possibly other programs. It seems to only affect Mac users and Word 2008.
One post claimed that Microsoft said that they changed the way the clipboard works in 2008 so it met the “proper” specifications. Apparently–if this is true– prior to Word 2008, the clipboard wasn’t doing its thing properly even though other applications didn’t seem to mind. Now that it’s been “fixed”, other applications also need to be fixed.
Common suggestions are to complain to both Microsoft and Adobe.
This was my question.
Thanks for the fast and complete reply, David. And thanks to the rest who replied. At least I now know I’m not completely insane ? or I’m at least not alone in my insanity.
I’m not sure what’s going on as I never had this problem with CS4 and Word 2008, but I do with those now. I don’t know if an update on either software could have affected it, or maybe, as you wrote, it’s the OS. This on all on OS 10.5.8 FWIW. This was not a problem before I installed CS5 on my Mac. (I used the same workflow for my brochure designs in both versions.)
I use iClip, which allows me to edit the copied text on the clipboard. After I paste the text into InDesign as a PNG, I can still edit the text in iClip, which will then allow me to paste the text as text. If I first paste into ID and then paste out of iClip, it’s a PNG. I’m just not sure what that means here, if anything.
The odd thing is, it doesn’t happen all the time.
A great case in point, I had successfully copied-and-pasted from that same Word doc into the same InDesign file. It worked fine for anything that was bulleted, but not for just regular paragraphs.
Oh well, TextEdit and Pages can both open Word docs, and I don’t have the same problem when pasting from that.
I am constantly pasting text from all kinds of sources, Web, Word 2007, and PDF files I have into InDesign. If it is stubborn, I use Notepad++ for all of these sorts of problematical pastes. When there is a table involved, I use Illustrator to fix the font sizes and table margins.
I use a PC running 64bit Windows 7.
Good luck with the work.
Very interesting discussion regarding cut and paste. Does the operating system change text to an image? What happens if you cut and paste into a text editor?
I tried copying a Text Frame from CS3 into CS5 and ended up with an image but this image is is understood only by InDesign and not by Corel or any other image editor (including Photoshop.)
On my Windows (XP) system, text is copied as text and images as images.
I am guessing that InDesign is converting the Text Object into Public Domain Format because I can create a new pdf file in Adobe Acrobat Pro. If I copy Word text to the clipboard, Acrobat Pro takes about 30 seconds.
So, if you want to know who the culprit is, try other programs to see what happens.
Why, in heaven’s name are you copy/pasting from Word to ID? When you do so you lose all local formatting and have to go in and make sure that the bolds are bold and the italics are italic (I admonish my students to NEVER copy paste). The way to bring text into InDesign is to PLACE it. Cmd/Ctrl D does the trick and a conversion makes sure that the Word document is properly placed in your ID. You might want to make sure to view options so you don’t bring in Word’s style sheets if you don’t want them cluttering up your paragraph styles.
Again, Copy/Paste bad, PLACE good.
Oh, and another advantage is that you don’t have to even open Word to PLACE your file. Why open a bloated application and take up important system resources when you don’t have to?
This sounds like a major, cross-platform, cross-application, cross-version bug! I’ll just use TextEdit or Pages from now on instead of Word, I generally do for my own writing anyway.
Alfred: Thanks for the information. PDF stands for Portable Document Format, not Public Domain Format.
John: I place longer documents, but I copy-and-paste when a Word document has to be completely rearranged and chopped up anyway. Sometimes, I just need one or two lines out of a longer document. I find it more work to place 50 pages, find the lines I need, and delete 49.985 pages than to (simply) copy-and-paste two lines. Maybe that’s just me though.
Also, and maybe it’s just been my luck, but I’ve had problems placing Word documents with images in it. So, if it’s a short piece, it’s sometimes quicker to copy-and-paste. I had one client who was bad about that, and I finally gave up explaining manuscript formatting. Unfortunately, that editing was so random that even GREP wasn’t much help.
I agree with Stanford’s comments here: I would always place longer documents (for the reasons that John mentions), but a paragraph here or there is no big deal to copy/paste.
Stanford, there are good solutions for stripping out the images in a Word file to use separately. I believe Anne-Marie will be covering that in her webinar next week. (Or, if you’re reading this later, it’ll likely be recorded.)
Thanks, David. I’ll watch for that. I’m moving during that time, so I hope it will be recorded; but it might be a good break for me too.
Eventually, I had to part ways with the client because I was spending four hours to design and a layout a 300 page trade book and about 10 hours getting the text in shape to be flowed and then cleaning it up again after flowing.
@ James
Unfortunately that kills the only piece of “formatting” that I want to retain, ie basic table structure ? although I have resorted to that on a number of occasions with particularly troublesome Word docs.
@John Clifford
You’d have to see the state of most “formatted” Word documents that I receive to believe it.
Over many, many years the one thing I repeatedly try to drum into clients is that Word is a great word processor. Take full advantage of that capability. It is NOT a layout program so please don’t waste your time and money doing formatting/layout in it.
If a client insists on doing all the layout and formatting in Word, I tell them its cheaper and easier for them to PDF that Word doc and we’ll print from that.
Otherwise, I’ve found the best thing to do with a Word doc (from a single A5 sheet to a 500 page book) is to bring it into a temporary Indesign file by whatever means I can, strip all the formatting out, force apply the basic paragraph style with no character style to everything, GREP it thoroughly, then place/copy that text into my live Indesign file and start from scratch. The only piece of Word “formatting” I’m interested in is that basic table structures are retained. Everything else gets removed.
I’ve found that’s the only way I can be certain when the inevitable copy changes come, now or x years down the track, that I can make the alterations without having some peculiarly Word formatted hangover stuff things up.
Cheers, Gobit
Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever once tried pasting text into InDesign without my Type cursor blinking in a text frame first. The thought never occurred me to do otherwise.
But you’re right, that’s what happens. I think the answer is: don’t do that. ;-)
@David: Actually, the Paste Without Formatting does apply to other clipboard contents (not just InDesign text). For example it will strip out the formatting in a bit of Word text that you paste into a text frame in ID. The regular Paste command retains the formatting of Word text you paste (if you have that option turned on in Prefs > Clipboard Handling.)
Hi guys im having the same problem.
Copying into text edit then into indesign seems to be the only solution. Although this is very time consuming. If any one comes across a solution I would be very grateful.
Im thinking about uninstalling everything and then reinstalling Indesign and Word. Has anyone tried this?
I tired to call the Abobe helpline. But A: they don’t speak english and B: they don’t know how to use Indesign. It’s very frustrating. Thank god for blogs. At least I know i’m not going crazy.
I found a remedy, but it is awkward.
I run a school newspaper and am frustrated to find the same unexplained problem. It stared when I upgraded to Word 08. I tried communicating with several desktop publishing people and design artists and found no explanation. Indeed bizarre.
My remedy has to copy from Word and paste the text into Pages or another word processor. I am guessing text edit will work as stated above, but I did not try it. If I paste into Pages, then immediately copy and paste into Indesign, it work fine.
It must be a Microsoft clipboard error. This article was copy and pasted from Word, so it is a Word/Adobe situation, and I believer more on the Word side.
I just ready this string about the copy/paste function from Word to Indesign CS5. I’ve experienced crashing problems when coping from Word to Incopy CS5. Not sure if it’s related, but just wanted to put that out there.
I just momentarily had this problem also. I think I found a simple fix, try copying something else from the word document then going back to the text you wanted and copying and pasting that whilst in InDesign having the box selected with the text tool.
It seemed to work for me anyway.
Came across this discussion in my pursuit of an answer. I’ve recently been upgraded at work to Word for Mac 2011, and this problem is STILL occurring! I’m getting PNGs when I try to paste text from Word. Up until now I’ve been using OpenOffice, but had to switch because some formatting and characters were going missing. I can’t win for losing.
We’ve just switched to Snow Leopard, CS5.5 and Office 2011 and are seeing this problem for the first time.
A quick test shows I can copy from Word to TextEdit without problem. I can copy from TextEdit to InDesign without problem, whether TextEdit is set to Plain Text or RTF. I can copy from Firefox to Indesign and even from MS Excel to Indesign without a problem. But not from Word or Powerpoint to InDesign (haven’t tried Outlook yet).
If I view the clipboard contents (Finder>Edit>Show Clipboard), the text is shown to be RTF format (from TextEdit, Excel or Word).
Given this, if I was to suspect a culprit it would be Microsoft. Perhaps there’s a minor “bug” in their file format that is preventing InDesign from automatically recognising it as RTF. But if people are seeing the same problem from non-MS apps, I guess my theory is blown out of the water.
Update: It looks like Outlook>InDesign works fine. So, for us, the problem, so far, lies only with Word and PowerPoint.
I have found the best way to cut and paste type from Word 2008 for Mac is to open the word document, copy the text, draw a text frame in ID, select and open the story editor in ID (Command “Y”) paste text and you now have text instead of an image to manipulate.
Use OpenOffice.org – works just fine so far. Had the same issues in OSX and Word.
A massive help – thanks for this, it had been driving me mad!
I had the same problem. I tried all kinds of stuff, even iclip. What eventually worked (and I found on the Adobe help site) is making a text box on the document, switching to Word, highlighting the text and dragging it (using hot corners on Lion) and dropping it into the ID text box.
Easy as pie and works every time. If you enter a little text in ID then the text is automatically formatted, as well.
i tried to paste/place text with images from word 2009 to indesign cs3 and my indesign freezez so when i copy it from ord and pasting it , i does not paste the images is ther any way of doing this
@dee: Try using File > Place to import your text, not copy/paste.
I managed to fix this in Word. Go to Preferences > Edit (Authoring and Proofing Tools) and unclick the “Use smart cut and paste” box.
Let me know if this works for you.
I use
https://www.bluem.net/en/mac/plain-clip/
It’s a free app that sits in your dock, and when you click it, it changes your clipboard to plain text.
Install it, select text from word, copy, move to indesign, click the Plain Clip app on the dock, and paste an InDesign text box filled with the Word text. NO MUSS SOME FUSS.
I believe if you highlight the text you wish to paste and double click or right click (whichever) it will let you choose an option of “Paste Special” and you can choose how it will paste into Tumblr. :)