InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables

For Lori

Acknowledgments

I wrote not one but two books concurrently from late-spring, throughout summer, and into the autumn of 2024 (yeah, I am a little insane). This book you’re holding is the bigger, more complicated of the two. The other is InDesign Masterclass: Text Techniques (

ISBN

: 978-0-9890864-2-4). And I did it while also teaching classes eight hours a day, four days per week, plus hosting a weekly syndicated radio show. In other words: for the majority of 2024, I worked very long days, sometimes seven days a week. This book would not have been possible without the love and support of my amazingly supportive, astonishingly patient partner, Lori. Thank you, my love.

My cat, Neytiri, was equally patient and, in her own way, supportive. For all the times I had to say, Daddy has to work, and all the times you slept on my desk late into the night, thank you, Neytiri. Now it’s time for all the play you can handle!

To my family and friends who wondered where I’d disappeared to, why my social media went quiet except for what the radio show team posted, this is where. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for calling and lunching to catch me up on the goings-on in your lives that I missed.

I want to thank everyone who read my previous books, and especially everyone who read and commented on my previous books and how they did, and could better, help you and your design work. You informed this book, this entire InDesign Masterclass series. This series, this book, is for—and because—of you. Thank you for reading me then and now.

I also want to acknowledge and thank all the other InDesign users I’ve had the privilege of instructing, speaking before, hanging out with, and interacting with on the Adobe Forums, YouTube, Twitter, my Facebook InDesign group, and other forums, both in-person and on-line. Your insights, questions, elations, and frustrations are the genesis for this book and the entire InDesign Masterclass series. You inspired this book, and I only hope I’ve done you justice in its execution.

My most sincerest thanks, posthumous though they may be, to Johannes Gutenberg, Aldus Manutius, Claude Garamond, John Warnock, Chuck Geschke, Paul Brainard, Tim Gill, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and everyone else who got us to the Desktop Publishing Revolution.

About the Author

Pariah Burke is a leading expert in digital design and publishing, with a career spanning over two decades. He has authored or co-authored 10 books on Adobe InDesign and related topics, along with producing 26 video courses that have educated professionals worldwide.

As a veteran trainer, Pariah has taught thousands of graphic designers, layout artists, and production staff globally, imparting his deep knowledge of Adobe InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop, Illustrator, and electronic publishing. His expertise also encompasses cutting-edge fields like artificial intelligence and accessibility in electronic documents, making him a sought-after consultant and speaker.

Throughout his career, Pariah has served as an advisor to industry giants such as Adobe, Quark, and Extensis. His extensive client list includes organizations like

NASA

, Lockheed Martin, Nike, Johns Hopkins University, and several U.S. government agencies, including the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps,

NSA

,

CIA

, and the

FDA

.

At the university level, Pariah teaches graduate courses on InDesign, audiobooks, book production, and ebook production to Masters-level students, preparing the next generation of publishing professionals for the dynamic demands of their industry. His contributions to the Adobe Certified Expert exam and to the actual features of InDesign underline his status as a recognized authority in InDesign, InCopy, and Illustrator.

Beyond his technical and educational pursuits, Pariah connects with a global audience of Rock N’ Roll fans as the host and producer of the syndicated weekly radio broadcast, The Hard, Heavy & Hair Show, where he interviews Rock legends from across generations.

Pariah Burke is a prolific and respected voice in the digital design community, dedicated to empowering creative professionals around the world. Outside of his professional pursuits, Pariah enjoys exploring the trails, lakes, waterfalls, and other natural beauty of Portland, Oregon, attending concerts, sci-fi conventions, and renaissance fairs, and immersing himself in a good novel or audiobook.

Attention instructors and trainers!

Use this book in your classes!

Deep discounts are available on bulk purchases of PDF, reflowable EPUB, and Fixed-Layout EPUB (FXL) versions purchased directly from the publisher at https://InDesignMasterclass.com

Introduction

This book is the most comprehensive reference I’ve ever written or even read about InDesign’s core competency: working with text. If you choose to read it linearly, cover to cover, that’s fine. That wasn’t what I envisioned when I wrote it, however. I foresee InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables sitting on your desk (or computer) as a reference you turn to when see something in InDesign you don’t know everything about, whose utility to you you’re not quite sure of. This is a book that fills in gaps in education—especially for self-taught InDesign users or those who started with beginner-level InDesign books that, by necessity, have to leave out an awful lot.

I wrote this book concurrently with another title during the spring, summer, and fall of 2024. Two books at once? Yup. It was insane, but I did it. Moreover, I’m very glad with the way both turned out.

First, you have this book, InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables, the larger of the two by about 300 pages. At the same time, I wrote InDesign Masterclass: Text Techniques, full of step-by-step recipes for achieving all kinds of effects and techniques with characters, paragraphs, tables, text frames, tabs,

GREP

styles, and much more. Between the two books I wrote 732 pages about InDesign during that period. But that’s not all. Even as I was writing both of the first two InDesign Masterclass volumes, I was wrote half of my next book, the third volume in the series, InDesign Masterclass: Objects & Documents.

They all started because I wanted to update Mastering InDesign for Print Design & Production, which Sybex/John Wiley & Sons and I had published a few editions of throughout the years. I started writing and revising from the last edition of that book, though it quickly occurred to me that the limitation of the book—the for Print Design & Production part of the title—was not the direction in which I wanted to go. Yes, of course, InDesign will always be central to print design and print production, but the world has changed since the first edition of that book. The word print doesn’t just mean ink on paper anymore. Truth be told, it didn’t even then. I got around the titular limitation of Mastering InDesign for Print Design & Production by also writing books about electronic publishing with InDesign and by creating numerous video courses about using InDesign and InCopy in solo- and team-based publishing workflows that included print, true, but also included

EPUB

and fixed-layout ebooks, interactive

PDF

s, Adobe Digital Publishing Solution, and Adobe Experience Manager.

This time, though, I wanted to bring everything InDesign into a single book… Which I ultimately didn’t. Instead, I’m bringing everything InDesign into a series of books: InDesign Masterclass.

I’ll be honest, I made the decision in part because I didn’t want you straining a shoulder carrying around a 1,200 page InDesign book. I knew I wasn’t holding anything back from InDesign Masterclass. Everything (relevant) that I’ve learned in more than 20 years teaching and writing about InDesign, I put into the InDesign Masterclass series. This first book, InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables, is every piece of information, trick, and best practice I’ve accumulated from projects I’ve built, courses I’ve created, classes I’ve taught, classes Adobe put me through when I worked there, books I’ve read, conference sessions I’ve attended, and your projects and workflows you’ve shown me or asked for my help in perfecting. This is the no holds barred InDesign book I’ve always wanted to write… broken up into three books so you don’t get rucksack palsy.

InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables is everything about InDesign’s core competency: working with text. Whether you’re a 20-year-veteran of InDesign or a brand new user, you’ll learn something new from this book. The question is the distance you’ll travel. You can go from veteran to master, beginner to master, or to master from any other point in your InDesign experience. You’ll learn not only how every type- or table-related function of InDesign works, what all the options and subtle changes accomplish, but also the why and when of using InDesign features. Why would you choose this over that? When should you employ this technique or that methodology? That’s what the book is about. It’s not just a click here, click there software manual; it’s an education in InDesign as it’s used in real world, professional design and production roles.

InDesign Masterclass: Text Techniques is page after page of step-by-step tutorials, recipes for effects and techniques, and tips for varying my tutorials for your own projects and needs. It’s an entire book full of the main reason people buy magazines, read blog posts, and watch YouTube videos. It’s all the sidebar tricks and how-tos you’d find in other software books, but expanded to so much more. In fact, that’s how InDesign Masterclass: Text Techniques began. Several of the techniques are expanded versions of sidebars and appendixes in Mastering InDesign, ePublishing with InDesign, and my other books. Others are techniques I’ve shown on stage at conferences and speaking tours, the tutorials that make the audiences’ eyes grow wide, their jaws drop, and their hands beat rapidly against one another—sometimes they even stand to applaud after some of what you’ll read in that book.

I sincerely thank you for reading my book. Teaching others what I’ve learned so that they can be more creative without barriers is my life’s work and my greatest honor. This book is conceived, written, designed, and laid out entirely by me. I will be honored and grateful if it teaches you something.

Now, design something!

Sincerely,

Pariah Burke

Portland, Oregon, USA

And more, much more than this, I did it my way. ~Frank Sinatra

How to Use This Book

While I suppose you could read it cover-to-cover (it’s only 200 pages, after all), I didn’t write it in a way that needs to be read linearly. Instead, I recommend you check out the Table of Contents, find a technique that interests you, and use it to help you start creating something cool. The other recipes will be there when you want to create a different cool thing.

When an advanced technique incorporates another, foundational technique, the latter is cross-referenced from within the former. If you’re reading one of the electronic versions of this book—

PDF

is the best version of it, in my opinion—you’ll find those cross-references are hyperlinks that jump you directly to the referenced recipe.

Special URLs

Where hyperlinks and

URLs

are included in this book, they mostly employ a

URL

shortener service.

URL

s that begin with https://abbrv.it/ use the

URL

shortening service I own. Note: such URLs are case-sensitive. Their use in this book provides two benefits to you. First, they allow me to present you with Web addresses that are typically much shorter and easier to remember and retype, which is especially useful to readers of the print editions of this book. Because Web-based pages, articles, downloads, and other resources change location from time to time, the second benefit of using my

URL

shortener is that you don’t have to go hunting down content Adobe.com or some other website moved. I do.

If a link stops working, tell me via email to [email protected]. I’ll then see if I can find where the resource moved to, and update the destination of the shortened

URL

to that new location.

How to Contact the Author

If this or any of my books is helpful to you, if you use any of my techniques in a project, or if you have a suggestion to improve this book or another in the InDesign Masterclass series, please let me know. I welcome the contact. Although I’m on just about every social media, I often don’t open them for weeks at a time writing a book (and I get a lot of

DM

spam anyway), so the best way to reach me is good ol’ fashioned email. You can email me at [email protected] or reach out to me from https://iamPariah.com/contact .

Also by Pariah Burke

Training, Consulting, and Development

Visit https://iampariah.com for the highest-quality, most learner-focused, bespoke training, consulting, and development services.

Training

Timely, tailored, results-oriented Adobe, Microsoft, Canva, Elearning, Section 508/Accessibility, and other software training delivered in a variety of formats: Instructor Led Training, Virtual Instructor Lead Training, On-Site Classroom Training, Private Customized Training, White Label Subcontract Training, and Project-Based Training.

Consulting

Services beyond training and development can include anything from customized hybrid education-development events that result in your team learning to create projects while actually building a deliverable, ready-for-market project, all the way through me spending time evaluating and helping to revamp your creative professional department on-site.

Instructional Design

Adult learning theory-based conception and development of elearning modules and courses, video-based instruction, written education such as manuals, job aids, step-by-steps, and other forms, as well as development of testing and results evaluation systems.

Document Development & Remediation

Learning to develop projects or remediate projects isn’t always your goal or an option with a specific deadline. If that’s the case, vend the project to me. I can develop many types of print, digital, elearning, audio, video, and Web projects from scratch while working with your

SME

s and stakeholders, from a previous version requiring updates, or from an incomplete or falling behind existing project. My most popular development work is to remediate non-accessible

PDF

s and other documents and make them Section 508-compliant and accessible to people with disabilities.

Books

Pariah Burke, sometimes credited as Pariah S. Burke, has authored or co-authored other books:

InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables

InDesign Masterclass: Text Techniques

Mastering InDesign for Print Design and Production

ePublishing with InDesign

The Business of ePublishing

InDesign: Creating Fixed-Layout eBooks

InDesignSecrets Guide to What’s New in InDesign CS5

Adobe Illustrator @Work

(co-author) Real World QuarkXPress

(co-author) Using Adobe Creative Suite: Special Edition

Video Courses

Pariah Burke has been an author since 2011 with Pluralsight.com, a quality-over-quantity, highly discriminating online learning library, where he has authored more than 30 top-rated video courses spanning dozens of hours.

InDesign Tip-o-the-Week: 52 Powerhouse Tips and Tricks

InDesign Publish Online

InDesign Projects: Designing a Flyer

InDesign Projects: Designing a Book Cover and Spine

InDesign Mastering Type

InDesign Mastering Productivity

InDesign Mastering Objects

InDesign Mastering Documents

InDesign Long Documents, Books, Manuals

InDesign Interactive

PDF

InDesign Integration with InCopy

InDesign Fixed-Layout eBooks

InDesign

EPUB

Fundamentals

InDesign

EPUB

Building on the Fundamentals

InDesign DPS Fundamentals

InDesign DataMerge and Variable Data Printing

InCopy Fundamentals

InCopy Building on the Fundamentals

Illustrator Typography

Illustrator Pixels to Vectors

Designing in Duotone in Photoshop and InDesign

Creating a Brand Style Guide

Advanced Typography

Adobe Digital Publishing System Designing and Building Apps

Adobe Digital Publishing System Creating Content in InDesign

Adobe Digital Publishing System Adding Content from

HTML

and WordPress

Non-Design-Related

The Hard, Heavy & Hair Show syndicated radio show

Podcast: Hard, Heavy & Hair: The Interviews

Chapter 1: Text Frames

All text must be within a container, so the first step to mastering type and tables is mastering their container, Text Frames, including how to fill those frames and make them reader-friendly.

In this chapter you will master:

Creating and filling text frames

Setting text in columns

Spanning and splitting columns

Text import options

Preventing readers from jumping the gutter

Creating Text Frames

The most basic text holder is a rectangular frame, and the easiest way to make one is to click and drag with the Type tool. As soon as you let go of the mouse, your text frame will be fixed and an I-beam cursor will be activated inside it, ready to accept your words of wisdom. You can then type something into the new frame. Figure 1 shows my words of…well, not wisdom, surely. Let’s say my words of satire.

A newly created text frame containing text

You can also make text frames that aren’t rectangular. If that’s your goal, don’t start with the Type tool. Instead, grab one of the shape tools—the Ellipse tool or Polygon tool, both hiding behind the Rectangle tool five down from the Type tool. Draw the shape you want, and then click inside the shape with the Type tool. Whatever the shape, it will instantly be converted into a text frame, ready to accept typed, pasted, or placed text. You can even draw a new shape with the Pen or Pencil tools—as long as you create a closed path; a simple click inside with the Type tool converts the path to a text frame. You can even thread any or all of these shapes together or with rectangular text frames.

Text frames can be created anywhere—on the page, on the pasteboard, overlapping both. Once created, they can be moved by selecting them with the Selection tool (the Black Arrow) and dragging. Resizing is just as easy: Once selected, a text frame will display its eight control corners—four at the corners and four more at the centers of each side. There’s also a theoretical ninth control corner at the center of the frame. Dragging all but the center point will resize the frame. Dragging the center point—or anywhere away from the other eight—will simply move the frame.

Notice as you resize the frame with the Selection tool, the text wraps to accommodate but does not resize. In a short while, we’ll get into the different ways to style and format text. For now, it’s more important to cover the ways in which text makes it into InDesign.

Getting Text into Text Frames

On many occasions, you’ll know exactly what to type into a newly created text frame. On others, you won’t. While you’re waiting on a client, editor, or copywriter to provide the text for a layout, for example, you’ll need to employ dummy text while you design. It’s what we call greeking or For Position Only (FPO) text; it enables you to work out the placement and style of type ahead of having genuine content.

Importing a Text File

Typing directly into InDesign is one way of getting text into your layout, and many people do it just that way. Most of the time, for longer text anyway, you’ll write copy outside of InDesign and import it. If you work on a publication or in another collaborative environment, odds are good that someone else will write the copy and you’ll have to place and style it. Let’s use the old stand-by Lorem Ipsum to simulate such tasks.

Create a new text frame with the Type tool. Just like last time, you’ll immediately have an I-beam cursor ready to type—don’t.

Instead, choose File  Place (CMD+D/CTRL+D).

In the Place dialog, bring in any

TXT

file, or, after downloading the InDesign Masterclass: Type & Tables lesson files, highlight the file lorem.txt and click Open. Five-hundred-year-old nonsense should fill your text frame (see Figure 2).

Note:

Download files for use in this chapter at https://abbrv.it/IDMC1download

The venerable Lorem Ipsum filling a text frame

You’ve just imported an

ASCII

text file, and it doesn’t look too bad. Now repeat the process with the bad-lorem.txt file. Not so nice, is it?

Text Import Options

The text in bad-lorem.txt is roughly equivalent to what you might get from an email message or something typed directly into Windows’s Notepad or Mac’s TextEdit. Lines are short and, instead of wrapping dynamically, contain hard line breaks. Choose Type  Show Hidden Characters to see what I mean; it reveals all the nonprinting characters (what QuarkXPress calls invisibles, if you’re migrating to InDesign from that application). Figure 3 shows what you should be seeing, although the width of your text frame may alter the view somewhat.

Show Hidden Characters reveals just how bad bad-lorem.txt really is.

Email and plain-text editors have a tendency to break lines of type after a few words by inserting a hard carriage return, as signified by the pilcrow, or paragraph mark (¶). They also don’t like to use real tabs because tab characters are not always compatible with the

ASCII

text format. Because email and plain-text editors lack paragraph spacing capabilities, vertical white space between paragraphs is usually accomplished by using multiple carriage returns—a major typesetting no-no.

As you might expect, all this makes for some very ugly copy and could be a lot of tedious cleanup work for you, the InDesign user. In other applications you often have to go through the text manually deleting the extra carriage returns, replacing the faux tabs with a smack of the keyboard Tab key, and, one line at a time, rejoining all the lines of a paragraph. Fortunately, InDesign was built with an automated way to clean up most of this mess.

Create a new text frame with the Type tool.

Choose File Place, and once again highlight bad-lorem.txt, but don’t press the Open button yet.

Toward the bottom of the Place dialog is a check box labeled Show Import Options. Check that, and then click Open. Up will pop the Text Import Options dialog (see Figure 4).

The Text Import Options dialog box

Check all four of the check boxes in the Text Import Options dialog and click OK. Bad-lorem.txt should import looking a lot less bad.

What do all those check boxes mean?

Character Set Every text file has a character set associated with it. Character sets are dependent upon human-written language—such as Cyrillic, Turkish, Chinese, or Latin—and machine-written language or the operating system. Because the character set is nearly always encoded in the header of the text file, which InDesign reads, it’s usually best to stick with InDesign’s suggestion unless you know for certain that the default choice is incorrect.

It’s All Greek Latin To Me

Don’t know what Character Set to choose? All of the following languages (and more) use the Latin alphabet (A–Z): Afrikaans, Albanian, Aymara, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Gaelic (Irish and Scottish), Galician, German, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Javanese, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Ladin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Maori, Mongolian, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sardinian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tetum, Turkish, Ukrainian (Latinized), Vietnamese, Walloon, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu. If your text is in any of those languages, you want to choose a Latin-based character set, which is ANSI, Unicode, or DOS Latin 2.

So which of those should you select—assuming InDesign doesn’t select the right one? Unicode, specifically Unicode UTF8 or UTF16. UTF1 was the extremely basic ASCII encoding that supports little more than unaccented upper and lowercase A–Z, a–z, 0–9, and basic punctuation. UTF8 supports full internationalization of Latin-based languages, including all the accents and diacritics common to most such written languages. UTF16, as you might expect, is an expansion that goes even further, but primarily for emoji and other advanced features of modern text message communications and programming languages.

Platform Was the file created on Windows or Mac OS? This is important because the default character sets of the two differ, and a wrong choice could lead to characters, or glyphs, exchanging for something unexpected. If you get strange characters in your imported text, try reimporting while switching the Platform setting. Again, though, InDesign usually picks up on the correct platform and often doesn’t even let you change its choice.

Set Dictionary To For spell checking and hyphenation purposes, choose the language of the text. Again, InDesign usually selects the correct one here because the language is encoded into the header of the incoming file.

Remove (Extra Carriage Returns) at End of Every Line When dealing with a file like bad-lorem.txt, this is the most important setting. Turning this on will strip out all the extraneous carriage returns breaking lines within a paragraph. Manually removing them would be the bulk of the tedious cleanup, so be sure to check this option when importing most

ASCII

text files or content saved from text-only email.

Remove (Extra Carriage Returns) between Paragraphs Fairly self-explanatory, this option will search out any instance of two or more consecutive hard returns and replace them with one return, readying the text for proper paragraph differentiation through indents or paragraph spacing above and/or below.

Replace X or More Spaces with a Tab In bad-lorem.txt, as is common with output from plain-text editors, tabs are not tabs but consecutive spaces. This option will search out the specified number of spaces and replace them with real tabs. In the bad-lorem.txt file itself, I’ve set most paragraphs to begin with five consecutive tabs, but leaving the default value of 3 in place will also do the trick.

Use Typographer’s Quotes Quotation marks look like (), while () are marks that signify inches in distance and scale measurements or minutes in written out time notations or global positioning coordinates. Plain-text files, with their extremely limited glyph set, rarely contain the former. Consequently, quoted text is encased in inch marks. Turning on the Use Typographer’s Quotes option will replace inch marks with real quotation marks. It will also replace foot or hour marks (‘) with genuine apostrophes (’). It’s on by default and should stay that way unless you’re importing a document containing measurements, time notations, geographic coordinates, or snippets of programming code.

Once set, the text import options will remain in that state—they’re what we call sticky settings. So next time you import a text file, you can uncheck Show Import Options in the Place dialog. However, should you import a text file containing a list of items or structural dimensions, you’ll want to revisit the Text Import Options dialog and disable some of the options there to avoid mangling your copy.

Word Import Options

Importing plain-text

ASCII

is a once-in-a-while thing at best. Most InDesign users get the majority of their copy from rich text word processors like Microsoft Word. Rich text is a far more robust file format than plain text and rarely suffers from forced line breaks every 80 characters. In fact, Rich Text Format,

RTF

for short, can support paragraph spacing, tabs, typographer’s quotes, text formatting like italic, bold, and underline, and even style sheets (more on those in Chapter 5: Styles). Thus,

RTF

files have a different set of options for importing.

Word’s native

DOCX

(and older DOC) files are based on

RTF

, and the two behave nearly identically with regard to placement in InDesign. Thus, we’ll work with a Word DOC file. To get started, create a text frame. Choose File  Place, and select the loremWord.doc document. Make sure Show Import Options is checked before clicking Open. Up will pop the Microsoft Word Import Options dialog (see Figure 5). Here’s what the options you’ll see mean:

The Microsoft Word Import Options dialog

Preset Although your only current option here is likely [Custom], through the Save Preset button on the right it’s possible to save the selection of options as a preset. Once saved, a set of import options can be reactivated by choosing the preset from this drop-down menu. If you import Word or

RTF

files and even occasionally require different options, it’s worth it to save a preset or two.

(Include) Table of Contents Text Word can generate dynamic, hyperlinked tables of contents based on headings or other styles used in a given document. InDesign can import the text of those tables of contents, but it cannot import it as dynamic or hyperlinked. For instance, if in Word the heading Scumdot Tests on the Linotype 1500 appears on page 57 but upon import into InDesign winds up on page 63, the

TOC

will still read 57 and will not automatically update itself.

Only new tables of contents created using InDesign’s built-in

TOC

generation can create references relevant to text on InDesign pages.

(Include) Index Text As with a table of contents, Word and InDesign can both dynamically generate hyperlinked indexes, but a Word-generated index will survive the import only as unremarkable (and usually useless) static text.

(Include) Footnotes and Endnotes Unlike its treatment of a table of contents or an index, InDesign will preserve the dynamic nature of Word’s footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes and their references will be imported and, if they differ from the footnote settings in the InDesign document, renumbered in accordance thereto. Endnotes will be inserted as formatted text at the end of the imported story.

If you do not want footnotes and endnotes to be dynamic, activate the Import as Static Text option to bring them in the same way TOCs and indexes are imported.

Use Typographer’s Quotes Just as with plain-text import, this option will convert inch and foot or minute and hour marks into quotation marks and apostrophes, respectively. This can be a gotcha if your document contains legitimately used marks for measurements, time, or geographic coordinates. Generally, I leave this option off, which, when I tell people that, generally raises an eyebrow in surprise. The reason I leave the Use Typographer’s Quotes option turned off is because Word and every other word processor already uses typographer’s quotes (sometimes called smart quotes but really just called quotes because the other things aren’t quotes at all), converting straight marks to proper quotations and apostrophes as their users type. In fact, modern word processors makes users go through several extra steps to not insert actual quotation marks or apostrophes. Thus, if a foot/hour or inch/minute mark is within the incoming Word document, it’s almost certainly there intentionally.

Tip:

Need to place an external text document into the middle of the text already in a frame? Just put the cursor in the right spot and import with Show Import Options checked. Remove styles and formatting and the inserted text will automatically inherit the style and formatting of the text into which it’s inserted.

Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables Because Word documents are fully rich text, the text in them can be emboldened, italicized, underlined, struck through, and even a combination thereof. If the author of the Word document knew what they were doing, you’ll probably want to leave this radio button set on Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables. If, however, the Word document author went format-crazy, choosing to remove styles and formatting (along with unchecking Preserve Local Overrides) will strip off all the formatting and styles, importing clean text ready for proper formatting in InDesign.

Preserve Local Overrides When Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables is selected, this option becomes available. Off, it completely wipes all formatting from imported text—bold text is unbolded, italicized type is straightened, and so on. Check it, however, and all the styles (aka style sheets) will be wiped away but individual text formatting options like bold, italic, underline, and so on will survive the import.

Convert Tables To (Accessible only if Remove Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables is selected.) If the imported text contains tables, how would you like them treated? Would you prefer them imported as InDesign tables (Unformatted Tables), or would you rather convert them to tab-separated text (Unformatted Tabbed Text), which can then either be formatted as such or manually converted to an InDesign table?

Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables All text formatting and assigned styles are preserved. On by default and required for any of the following choices to be accessible.

Manual Page Breaks Word, InDesign, and most other word processor and page layout applications offer the ability to insert break characters that stop text anywhere on the page and jump it to the next page before continuing. The three options in this drop-down offer the choice of keeping page breaks as defined in Word, converting Word’s page breaks to InDesign column breaks—instead of picking up on the next page, the text will start up again in the next column of a multicolumn InDesign layout—or dumping Word’s page breaks altogether.

Tip:

Embedded Word graphics can be extracted from InDesign.

A handy trick for getting inline graphics out of a Word document so that you can use them outside of Microsoft Office is to import the Word document, with Import Inline Graphics enabled, and then use InDesign’s Links panel to unembed them, creating standalone image files again. If you don’t already know how to unembed from InDesign, just follow these steps:

Select the graphic(s) on the Links panel.

Choose Unembed from the Links panel flyout menu.

Choose where to save your unembedded images.

Several things happen automatically during this process:

InDesign exports the image(s) to their original file format—if was a JPG when placed into Word, it will export from InDesign as a JPG, PNG to PNG, and so on.

The graphic instance in your document will be replaced, removing the embedded copy with a linked reference to the image where you chose to save it in Step 3.

All attributes, properties, and effects of the original embedded image will be transferred to the linked version.

Import Inline Graphics Generally a bad idea from a print professional’s perspective, Word has the ability to embed graphics and imagery directly in the flow of text (which Microsoft Office calls inline graphics). Typically, graphics inserted in this manner do not link to their original files; they’re contained entirely within the Word document. Employing this feature is a very common practice among Word users inexperienced in professional print workflows. Checking Import Inline Graphics will bring those embedded images into InDesign as embedded, anchored object. Unchecking it will flush those images out of the text as if they never existed.

Import Unused Styles Like InDesign, Word allows for reusable paragraph and character styles. Below this setting you’ll decide what to do with styles assigned to text in the Word document, but this option applies to styles that are not used but are available to be used within the Word document. In most cases you want this option unchecked to avoid cluttering your InDesign document with Word’s numerous default and user-created styles. Enabling it, however, is a nifty way to populate an InDesign document or template with styles already defined in a Word document or template—for example, when your company is dropping Word entirely and moving to an all InDesign and InCopy editorial workflow.

Track Changes InDesign does internal change tracking. If you’re importing a Word or

RTF

document that was set in Word to track changes, and includes some edits, comments, and changes, selecting this option will preserve those accountable changes in InDesign’s native format. Note that only the final version of the text will be visible, printed, and visually exported on the InDesign document page. Change tracking only shows a visual effect when text is viewed in a non-layout editor such as InCopy or InDesign’s Story Editor or Copy Editor. In those tools, highlights, strikethroughs, and collapsible sections reveal the changes within the Word text exactly as they do changes to native InDesign or InCopy story text when activating Track Changes in those applications.

Convert Bullets and Numbers to Text Should the bullets and numbers in Word’s dynamically created lists continue to be dynamic, updating as necessary (especially numbered lists), or should they be converted to regular, non-dynamic, editable text for selection and manual styling? Checking this option affects the latter.

Note:

508/Accessibility alert: For lists (numbered, lettered, or bulleted) to be accessible and Section 508-compliant, they must be dynamic lists. Activating the option to Convert Bullets and Numbers to Text will break accessibility in those incoming lists, and will probably require you to manually make them accessible again within Acrobat (which is a chore I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy).

Style Name Conflicts A yellow caution sign