Pasting from Word into InDesign

Bold/italic text is one of the few parts of Microsoft Word styling that design­ers actu­ally lament the loss of when trans­fer­ring con­tent from Word into InDe­sign. Word styles are gen­er­ally poorly used/abused, and accord­ingly the default is to throw them all out when import­ing text. Here’s how to avoid los­ing the baby with the bathwater.

In InDe­sign, press ⌘+K (Ctrl + K) to bring up the Pref­er­ences dia­log, then click through to the last pane, “Clip­board Han­dling”. At the bot­tom of this pane, under “When Past­ing Text and Tables from Other Appli­ca­tions”, set Paste to “All Infor­ma­tion (Index Mark­ers, Swatches, Styles, etc.)

Some Word styling will now import — watch care­fully to make sure noth­ing too stu­pid finds its way into your pris­tine InDe­sign document!

# by Josh on July 6th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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eBay piracy

I’m vaguely hunt­ing for a lap­top. Well, okay, a lit­tle more than vaguely – but as they’re reput­edly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that ser­vice as a pur­chas­ing vehi­cle is less than certain.

Soft­ware piracy also fea­tures… but, of course, there seems to be lit­tle that can be done to actu­ally report this (if eBay have a “Report vio­la­tion” link, it’s ade­quately hid­den from me). Observe this ques­tion from ear­lier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor and Inde­sign, and MS Office for Mac included:

Me: Does this come with orig­i­nal CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe soft­ware?
Seller: No.

(Yeah, that was full­text of the ques­tion + answer!)

And on another list­ing (I didn’t ask the ques­tion on this one!) adver­tised as includ­ing iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:

Q: Are you sell­ing the soft­ware disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the soft­ware, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be send­ing the lap­top and its power cable. Thanks.

Sigh.

(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not con­vinced I want a Mac lap­top any­more. In fact, I’d prob­a­bly pre­fer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)

# by Josh on February 10th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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