From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Importing text - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Importing text

- [Instructor] Okay, let's say you have a text file, such as this Word document, and you need to get it into InDesign. Now the easiest method is just to select some text and copy and paste it. And while this sometimes does work fine, especially for small amounts of simple unformatted text, I really don't recommend it for anything more than a paragraph or two. And I certainly wouldn't use copy and paste for any text that was formatted or included foreign language or special characters. I've just seen too many problems over the years with texts showing up totally wrong after pasting it. Instead, I strongly recommend that you use the Place command in InDesign. It's far more reliable. Let me show you. I'm going to switch back to InDesign and then I'll go to the file menu and choose Place, or you could press Command + D on the Mac or Control + D on Windows. Now I'm going to select that text file from the exercise files folder. Like I said, this is simply a Word document, but it could be any text or even an RTF file. Then I'll click open. Because I had no frames selected on my page, InDesign loads the Place cursor without story. Now if I had an empty text frame selected, the story would have gone right into it. But here, to place a story into my InDesign document, I'm going to move my cursor up to the upper-left corner near these margin guides until I see a subtle but important change. That tiny black arrow turns into a white arrow. You may have to squint to see it, but it's there. And that white cursor means that when I click, it's going to snap to the margin guides. So I'm going to get as close as I can to those margin guides, but I don't need to worry about placing it exactly right. Now I click and InDesign makes a text frame and flows the text into it. Now like I said, this document had no text frame on the page. There's also no frame on the master page. It's basically just a blank page. Also if I come over to my doc and open the pages panel, you can see that this page, number 7, is the last page of the document. However, I happen to know that this is a much longer story and it should have filled multiple pages. I really wish I could import the entire document at once. And fortunately, you can. Let me show you how. I'm going to undo this placement with a Command + Z or Control + Z on Windows, and that reloads the place cursor. And now you can place this text file again, but with a modifier key. Hold down the Shift key. And when you press the Shift key down, the cursor changes a little bit. You get this kind of S-shaped arrow in there. And that indicates that when I click, it's going to flow all of the text. So once again, I'll move the cursor into the upper-left corner and then Shift + Click. This time InDesign not only imports just that one page, but the whole text story and it created a bunch of pages for me. And on each one of those pages, it made a new text frame and it threaded the text from one page to the next automatically. So that Shift key modifier is really important when you're importing a long story. Now there is one more thing that I want to point out. Let's jump to the next spread. Look at the formatting in here. It looks much nicer than it did in my word processing program, right? Let me go back to Word and show you. See, here it's all in Calibri and Georgia. The formatting here in Word makes it easy to edit, but it's not very pretty. But here in InDesign, it looks different. How did that happen? Well, I'm going to be talking about paragraph styles and character styles in a later chapter, but I do want to point out now that if the styles are named exactly the same between Word and InDesign, then InDesign will throw away the original boring formatting and it will use the formatting that's defined in InDesign instead. In this case, I'll go over to the paragraph styles panel here in the doc. And you can see that I have a lot of styles in here and they're named exactly the same as they were in Word. Now, a moment ago, I mentioned something about threading, the fact that this story threads from one page to the next. Well, what's that about? How could you manually thread stories from one text frame to another? Well, that's what I'm going to cover in the next movie.

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