RE: Transitioning Text Across Platforms

["Susan Guttman" <Susan -dot- Guttman -at- contactft -dot- com>]

The good news is, .txt works! :D

I worked as a digital typesetter for a while, and that's one of the biggest
trick in the typesetting bag - throw the Word text from the translators into
Notepad to strip out all the text-editor code-fluff before putting it into a
formatted document to prevent code-clash. Basically, Notepad only knows
ASCII, so that's all it can save - no formatting nonsense.

There are a couple of things to look for when working out of notepad,
however: 

1. Bullets and other embedded graphics. A bullet is essentially a picture of
a dot with a tab to either side, and in Notepad, that's exactly what is
becomes. It no longer has the "I am a bullet" code attached to it that can be
turned on and off. You'll have to strip out the dot and spaces and re-apply
bullet formatting in the new doc.

2. Same for tabs in general. They become spaces that have to get manually
cleaned up.

3. Line breaks. Notepad is very literal about linebreaks when saving the
file. If you're just renaming or Saving As from Word to .txt, this isn't so
much of a problem, but if you are working in your notepad document, have
WordWrap enabled and then save from within Notepad, it will create line
breaks at the end of every line, wherever they happen to be according to the
size of the window. But as long as you remember to turn WordWrap off before
saving the file you should be fine.

Good luck!


Bill S. Guttman
TW Monkey


-----Original Message-----
From: Nuckols, Kenneth M

Subject: Transitioning Text Across Platforms



Good afternoon,

I started a new position about a month ago and have been developing content
for new documentation on an old "Frankenstein" computer the department IS guy
cobbled together with cast-off Habitrail wheels and duct tape while my new
computer was ordered. The news came today that the new computer has shipped
and the IS department should install it sometime next week. 

When it arrives I'll be faced with the task of transferring documentation
content from MS Word 2003 to Adobe InDesign CS. It sounds simple enough, but
I'm afraid of all the hidden embedded codes that Word loves to cram into
every document it creates. I want to strip out my text, all my text, and
nothing but my text when I transfer the content to InDesign. I've kept my
formatting to a minimum (mainly for
readability) since my current machine does not even have the fonts mandated
by the corporate style guide and includes no graphic creation or editing
software. Fortunately I'll have the full Adobe Creative Suite and Visio
Professional 2003 on the new PC. My question is for anyone who has made such
a transition:

What steps must I take to strip out the ubiquitous embedded codes from my
Word 2003 text before moving it to InDesign? 

My first guess would be to export the documents to a plain old .txt file from
Word, but that sounds too easy to get rid of all the embedded codes that
might want to migrate with my text.

Am I fretting needlessly, or are Word's codes truly so insidious that it
would be quicker to re-type all the text I've created from scratch?

Thanks.

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