Adding text

You can add text by typing, pasting, or importing text from another file. In general, you use standard word-processing techniques to work with text in InCopy. Select the Type tool  on the toolbox, and then use the techniques described below. These methods work the same way in Galley, Story, and Layout views, whether or not the content is linked to Adobe InDesign®.

Click the insertion point where you want to add text, and begin typing.

Drag, double-click, or triple-click to select individual characters, words, lines, or paragraphs (depending on the Preferences settings). Or click anywhere in the content, and choose Edit >Select All.

Copy or cut text, click at the location you want, and choose Edit > Paste. If you want to remove the formatting of the pasted text, choose Edit > Paste Without Formatting. If you want to add or remove spacing as necessary, select Adjust Spacing Automatically When Cutting And Pasting Words in the Type section of the Preferences dialog box.

You can also use Edit > Paste Without Grid Format to paste text into a frame grid so that the pasted text retains its font, font size, and character spacing settings of the copied text.

Select the text you want to delete, and choose Edit > Clear.

You can also import text directly from another text document.

Importing files

You can import text from other InCopy stories, Microsoft® Word, Microsoft Excel, and any application that can export text in Rich Text Format (RTF) or text-only format. All importable file formats are listed in the InCopy Place dialog box (in the Files Of Type menu for Windows®, and in the right list pane for Mac OS).

Document formatting and styles

You can import files with or without formatting. If you import the files with formatting, InCopy imports most character and paragraph formatting attributes from text files, but ignores most page-layout information, such as page breaks, margins, and column settings (which you can set in InDesign). In general, InCopy imports all formatting information specified in the word-processing application, except for features not available in InCopy.

If InCopy has an import filter for an application, you can determine which styles are imported, and which formatting to use if there is a name conflict.

Saving files for import

If your word-processing application can save files in more than one file format, try using the format capable of retaining the most formatting—either the application’s native file format or an interchange format such as Rich Text Format (RTF).

You can import files created in the recent versions of Microsoft Word. If you are placing a file from a different word-processing application or from Word 95 for Windows or earlier, such as Word 6, open the file in its original application and save it in a compatible Word format or in RTF, which preserves most formatting.

Place (import) text

For large amounts of text, the Place command is the most useful way to import content. InCopy supports a variety of word-processing, spreadsheet, and text file formats. The degree to which the original formatting is preserved depends on the import filter for the file type and the options you choose as you place the file. You can also open Word, text, and RTF files directly in InCopy.

Import options

When you import Word, Excel, and tagged text files, you can determine how the files are imported.

Microsoft Word and RTF import options

If you select Show Import Options when placing a Word file or an RTF file, you can choose from these options:

Imports the table of contents as part of the text in the story. These entries are imported as text only.

Imports the index as part of the text in the story. These entries are imported as text only.

Imports Word footnotes. Footnotes and references are preserved, but renumbered based on the document’s footnote settings. If the Word footnotes are not imported properly, try saving the Word document in RTF format and importing the RTF file.

Imports endnotes as part of the text at the end of the story.

Ensures that imported text includes left and right quotation marks (“ ”) and apostrophes (’) instead of straight quotation marks (" ") and apostrophes (').

Removes formatting, such as typeface, type color, and type style, from the imported text, including text in tables. Paragraph styles and inline graphics aren’t imported if this option is selected.

When you choose to remove styles and formatting from text and tables, you can select Preserve Local Overrides to maintain character formatting, such as bold and italics, that is applied to part of a paragraph. Deselect this option to remove all formatting.

When you choose to remove styles and formatting from text and tables, you can convert tables to either basic, unformatted tables or unformatted, tab-delimited text.

If you want to import unformatted text and formatted tables, import the text without formatting, and then paste the tables from Word into InCopy .

Preserves the Word document’s formatting in the InDesign or InCopy document. You can use the other options in the Formatting section to determine how styles and formatting are preserved.

Determines how page breaks from the Word file are formatted in InDesign or InCopy. Select Preserve Page Breaks to use the same page breaks used in Word, or select Convert To Column Breaks or No Breaks.

Preserves inline graphics from the Word document in InCopy .

Imports all styles from the Word document, even if the styles aren’t applied to text.

Imports bullets and numbers as actual characters, preserving the look of the paragraph. However, in numbered lists, the numbers are not automatically updated when the list items are changed.

Selecting this option causes Track Changes markups from the Word document to appear in the InCopy document. In InDesign, view track changes in Story Editor.

Imports styles from the Word document into the InDesign or InCopy document. If a yellow warning triangle appears next to Style Name Conflicts, then one or more paragraph or character styles from the Word document have the same name as an InCopy style.

To determine how these style name conflicts are resolved, select an option from the Paragraph Style Conflicts and Character Style Conflicts menu. Choosing Use InCopy Style Definition causes the imported style text to be formatted based on the InCopy style. Choosing Redefine InCopy Style causes the imported style text to be formatted based on the Word style, and changes existing InCopy text formatted with the Word style. Choosing Auto Rename causes the imported Word styles to be renamed. For example, if InCopy and Word have a Subheading style, the imported Word style is renamed Subheading_wrd_1 when Auto Rename is selected.

Lets you use the Style Mapping dialog box to select which InCopy style should be used for each Word style in the imported document.

Stores the current Word Import Options for later reuse. Specify the import options, click Save Preset, type the name of the preset, and click OK. The next time you import a Word style, you can select the preset you created from the Preset menu. Click Set As Default if you want the selected preset to be used as the default for future imports of Word documents.

Text-file import options

If you select Show Import Options when placing a text file, you can choose from these options:

Specifies the computer language character set, such as ANSI, Unicode UTF8, or Windows CE, that was used to create the text file. The default selection is the character set that corresponds to the default language and platform of InDesign or InCopy.

Specifies the computer language character set, such as ANSI, Unicode UTF8, Shift JIS, or Chinese Big 5, that was used to create the text file. The default selection is the character set that corresponds to the default language and platform of InDesign or InCopy.

Specifies whether the file was created in Windows or Mac OS.

Specifies the dictionary to be used by the imported text.

Specifies how extra paragraph returns are imported. Choose Remove At End Of Every Line or Remove Between Paragraphs.

Replaces the specified number of spaces with a tab.

Ensures that imported text includes left and right quotation marks (“ ”) and apostrophes (’) instead of straight quotation marks (" ") and apostrophes (').

Microsoft Excel import options

You can choose from these options when importing an Excel file:

Specifies the worksheet you want to import.

Specifies whether to import any stored custom or personal views, or to ignore the views.

Specifies the range of cells, using a colon (:) to designate the range (such as A1:G15). If there are named ranges within the worksheet, these names appear in the Cell Range menu.

Includes any cells formatted as hidden cells in the Excel spreadsheet.

Specifies how the spreadsheet information appears in the document.

InCopy tries to preserve the same formatting used in Excel, although the formatting of text within each cell may not be preserved. If the spreadsheet is linked rather than embedded, updating the link will override any formatting applied to the table in InCopy .

The table is imported without any formatting from the spreadsheet. When this option is selected, you can apply a table style to the imported table. If you format text using paragraph and characters styles, the formatting is preserved even if you update the link to the spreadsheet.

The table is imported as tab-delimited text, which you can then convert to a table in InDesign or InCopy.

InDesign preserves the same formatting used in Excel during the initial import. If the spreadsheet is linked rather than embedded, formatting changes made to the spreadsheet are ignored in the linked table when you update the link. This option isn’t available in InCopy.

Applies the table style you specify to the imported document. This option is available only if Unformatted Table is selected.

Specifies the cell alignment for the imported document.

Preserves inline graphics from the Excel document in InCopy .

Specifies the number of decimal places of spreadsheet figures.

Ensures that imported text includes left and right quotation marks (“ ”) and apostrophes (’) instead of straight quotation marks (" ") and apostrophes (').

Tagged-text import options

You can import (or export) a text file capable of taking advantage of InCopy formatting capabilities by using the tagged text format. Tagged-text files are text files containing information describing the formatting you want InCopy to apply. Properly tagged text can describe almost anything that can appear in an InCopy story, including all paragraph-level attributes, character-level attributes, and special characters.

For information on specifying tags, view the Tagged Text PDF at www.adobe.com/go/learn_id_taggedtext_cs5_en (PDF).

The following options are available when you import a tagged-text file and select Show Import Options in the Place dialog box.

Ensures that imported text includes left and right quotation marks (“ ”) and apostrophes (’) instead of straight quotation marks (" ") and apostrophes (').

Removes formatting, such as typeface, type color, and type style, from the imported text.

Specifies which character or paragraph style to apply when there is a conflict between the style in the tagged-text file and the style in the InDesign document. Select Publication Definition to use the definition that already exists for that style in the InDesign document. Select Tagged File Definition to use the style as defined in the tagged text.

Displays a list of unrecognized tags. If a list appears, you can choose to cancel or continue the import. If you continue, the file may not look as expected.

Import Buzzword documents

Buzzword is a web-based text editor that lets users create and store text files on a web server. In InCopy CS5, you can import and export text from Buzzword documents.

When you import a Buzzword document, a URL-based link is created to the Buzzword document on the server. When the Buzzword document is updated outside InCopy , you can use the Links panel to update the imported version in InCopy . However, doing so removes any changes to the Buzzword text you’ve made in InCopy .

Type Asian text using inline input

You can use a system input method, if available, for adding 2‑byte and 4‑byte characters. This method is especially useful for entering Asian characters.

You can use a special input program to input Asian text directly into text frames.