Add text to frames

Add text to a document by typing or by pasting or placing text from a word-processing application. If your word-processing application supports drag-and-drop, you can also drag text into InDesign frames. For large blocks of text, the Place command is an efficient, versatile way to add text to your document. InDesign supports a variety of word-processing, spreadsheet, and text file formats.

When you place or paste text, you do not need to create a text frame first; InDesign will create one for you automatically.

When you place text, you can select Show Import Options to determine whether the imported text maintains its styles and formatting. Before you paste text, you can select All Information or Text Only under Clipboard Handling Preferences to determine whether the pasted text includes additional information such as swatches and styles.

Type text in a document

If you created a text frame on a parent page, hold down Ctrl+Shift (Windows) or Command+Shift (Mac OS) as you click in the frame on your document page. This makes a copy of the primary text frame on the document page. You can then use the Type tool to add text to the selected frame.

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.

Insert placeholder text

InDesign can add placeholder text that you can easily replace with real text later. Adding placeholder text can give you a more complete sense of your document’s design.

If you add placeholder text to a frame that’s threaded to other frames, the placeholder text is added at the start of the first text frame (if all frames are empty) or at the end of the existing text (if some text is already in the threaded frames), through to the end of the last threaded frame.

To remove or replace placeholder text, double-click in any frame in the thread, choose Edit > Select All, and then delete the text.

Paste text

If the insertion point is not inside a text frame when you paste text into InDesign, a new plain text frame will be created. If the insertion point is inside a text frame, the text will be pasted inside that frame. If you have text selected when you paste, the pasted text will overwrite the selected text.

Paste text from another application

Adjust spacing automatically when pasting text

When you paste text, spaces can be automatically added or removed, depending on the context. For example, if you cut a word and then paste it between two words, a space appears before and after the word. If you paste that word at the end of a sentence, before the period, a space is not added.

Drag and drop text

You can use the mouse to drag and drop text in the Story Editor or in the Layout View. You can even drag text from the Story Editor to the layout window (or vice versa), or into some dialog boxes such as Find/Change. Dragging the text from a locked or checked-in story copies the text rather than moves it. You can also copy text or create a new frame when dragging and dropping text.

If the text you drop doesn’t have the proper spacing, select the Adjust Spacing Automatically option in Type Preferences.

Place (import) text

When you place a text or spreadsheet file, you can specify options to determine how the imported text is formatted.

If you haven’t already designated an existing frame to receive text, the pointer becomes a loaded text icon, ready to flow text wherever you click or drag.

If you receive an alert that the requested filter wasn’t found, you may be trying to place a file from a different word-processing application or from an earlier version of Microsoft® Word, such as Word 6. Open the file in its original application and save it as RTF, which preserves most formatting.

If the imported Microsoft Excel document displays red dots in cells, adjust cell size or text attributes so that overset content becomes visible. You can also place the file as unformatted tabbed text, and then convert the tabbed text to a table.

About import filters

InDesign imports most character and paragraph formatting attributes from text files but ignores most page-layout information, such as margin and column settings (which you can set in InDesign). Note the following:

• InDesign generally imports all formatting information specified in the word-processing application, except information for word-processing features not available in InDesign.

• InDesign can add imported styles to its list of styles for the document. A disk icon appears next to imported styles. (See Convert Word styles to InDesign styles.)

• The import options appear when you select Show Import Options in the Place dialog box, or when you import an Excel file. If Show Import Options is deselected, InDesign uses the import options last used for a similar document type. The options you set remain in effect until you change them.

• If InDesign cannot find a filter that recognizes a file by either its file type or file extension, an alert message appears. For best results in Windows, use the standard extension (such as .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, .xls, or .xlsx) for the type of file you’re importing. You may need to open the file in its original application and save it in a different format, such as RTF or text-only.

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 InDesign.

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 InDesign.

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 InDesign 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 InDesign 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 InDesign Style Definition causes the imported style text to be formatted based on the InDesign style. Choosing Redefine InDesign Style causes the imported style text to be formatted based on the Word style, and changes existing InDesign text formatted with the Word style. Choosing Auto Rename causes the imported Word styles to be renamed. For example, if InDesign 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 InDesign 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.

InDesign 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 InDesign.

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 InDesign.

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 InDesign formatting capabilities by using the tagged text format. Tagged-text files are text files containing information describing the formatting you want InDesign to apply. Properly tagged text can describe almost anything that can appear in an InDesign story, including all paragraph-level attributes, character-level attributes, and special characters.

When you import a tagged-text file and select Show Import Options in the Place dialog box, the following options are available:

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.

Save Word or RTF import options as presets

You can then select custom presets from the Preset menu in the Import Options dialog box whenever you open a Word or RTF file.

Import Buzzword documents

Buzzword is a web-based text editor that lets users create and store text files on a web server. In InDesign 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 InDesign, you can use the Links panel to update the imported version in InDesign. However, doing so removes any changes to the Buzzword text you’ve made in InDesign.

Link or embed imported text files

By default, text you place in InDesign is not linked to the original text file. However, if you select the Create Links When Placing Text And Spreadsheet Files option in File Handling preferences before you place a file, the name of the text file appears in the Links panel. You can use the Links panel to update and manage the file. When you update a linked text file, any editing or formatting changes applied within InDesign are lost. Because of this risk, linked text files are not automatically updated when the original file is edited. However, you can easily use the Links panel to update content or to unlink (embed) the file.