Importing Text correctly

Kevin Petersen

This topic has 3 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 9 years ago by Chris Thompson.

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- March 31, 2015 at 2:33 pm #74277
  
  Kevin Petersen
  Member
  
  Hi there,
  
  I usually get a long script in Word. In the script theres headers, indents with bullets, indents with numbers and a few words are bold and some italic. Of course there are also plain text.
  
  When I import the text into InDesign (File> Place), I hold down shift when I place the text. Now the text runs through several pages. The problem is that when I have finished everything and let’s say, the next day, I wanna add some text in one of the pages. Then every other page changes because I added some lines of text in one of them.
  
  And another thing.. I don’t know if I should select all the text and choose a font or if I should mark each text lines with a paragraph style or if I Should choose the font size in the paragraph style or character style. These two confuses me really much.
  
  What would be the best way for me to make this as easy as possible?
- March 31, 2015 at 2:49 pm #74278
  
  Dwayne Harris
  Member
  
  Well,
  
  1) If you are adding text to a page, then the text will reflow on all the following pages. Or is something else changing?
  
  2) I’d definitely use paragraph styles.
  
  3) You should do your font size and leading in the paragraph styles. Only use character styles for some other kind of font formatting (i.e., italic, bold, colored characters, shaded characters, etc.) Character styles are for exceptions. It’s not like the old days of Quark when folks wrote character styles into their paragraph styles (which annoyed me to no end).
  - March 31, 2015 at 3:24 pm #74279
    
    Kevin Petersen
    Member
    
    Thanks for the reply and the explanations.
    
    I mean that I basically wanna be able to import the whole document but I want parts of the text to stay on a page no matter what formatting I do on other pages. Get it?
- April 1, 2015 at 2:21 am #74285
  
  Chris Thompson
  Member
  
  Do you mean you want to import the text (auto-flow) into threaded text frames, one per page, and then unthread the text frames before any later edits? With the result that any text added on page 4 has no effect on page 5 et seq, and if there’s too much, it just shows overset text on page 4?
  
  If so, there’s help here:
  https://creativepro.com/splitting-up-threaded-stories-into-separate-frames.php
  
  Maybe a change of topic title might bring some more answers – the text is being imported “correctly” after all, but it seems like you want to subsequently break the links between threaded text frames.
  
  Good luck,
  Chris
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