From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

Importing text - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

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Importing text

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- [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 this sometimes works fine, especially for small amounts of simple unformatted text, but 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 and InDesign. It is far more reliable. Here, let me show you. I'm going to switch back to InDesign and 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 file. Like I said, it's simply a Word document, but it could be a text file or an RTF file. Then, I'll click Open. Because I had no frame selected on my page, InDesign loads the place cursor with that story. If I had an empty text frame selected, the story would've gone right into it. Or if I have a blank text frame on the page now, I could click on it to place the story into it. But in this case, there's no frame yet. So to place this story inside my InDesign document, I'm going to move my cursor up to the left corner of the margins here on the right-hand page until I see a subtle but important change. That tiny black arrow inside the cursor icon turns into a white arrow. You may have to squint to see it, but it's there. The 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 guides, but I don't need to worry about placing it exactly right. Now, I'll click and InDesign makes a text frame and flows the text into it. I should point out that after you place or paste text into InDesign, you may see a small gray box with the letter T appear in the lower right corner of the text frame. This is part of InDesign's Auto Style feature. InDesign is trying to be helpful, but don't click it or else it's going to remove all of your text formatting and try to apply its own styles based on some artificial intelligence. The results are, well, they're not pretty. So if you see that little gray box with a T, you can usually just ignore it. Now, like I said, this document had no text frame on the page. There's also no frame on the parent page. It's basically just a blank page. Also, if I open the Pages panel, you'll see that this is page seven and the document ends here. However, I happen to know that this is a much longer story. This 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 with a Command + Z on the Mac or Control + Z on Windows. And when I do that, it reloads the place cursor for me. So now, I'm going to place this text file again, but this time with a modifier key. I'm going to hold down this Shift key. And when you press the Shift key, 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 the text. So once again, I'm moving my cursor to the upper left corner right near the margins and I have the Shift key held down and now I click. This time, InDesign not only imported just that one page, but the whole text story. And look over here in the Pages panel. It added a bunch of pages for me and created new text frames on each of those and 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's one more thing that I want to point out. Let me jump to the next spread. Look at the formatting over 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 in Word, the formatting is very simple which makes it easy to edit, but it's not very pretty. But here in InDesign, well, it looks different. How did that happen? Okay, I'm going to be talking about paragraph styles and character styles in a later chapter. But I do want to point out right 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'll use the formatting that's defined in InDesign instead. For example, I'll open the Paragraph Styles panel over here in the dock, and you can see I have a bunch of paragraph styles defined in this document. And most importantly, they're named exactly the same as they were in Word. Now, just a moment ago, I mentioned something about threading. You know, the fact that this text frame is threaded to this text frame over here. Well, what's that about? How can 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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