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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Outlook 2010: The nightmare continues

As per a post­ing I made to the WSG list ear­lier this afternoon:

We have a prob­lem! Out­look 2010, accord­ing to Cam­paign Mon­i­tor, is going to con­tinue to use the crip­pled MS Word lay­out engine. They adopted this as the sta­tus quo for Out­look 2007 and promptly set rich email with CSS, etc., back a num­ber of years, and are show­ing no great sign of diverg­ing from this path. How­ever, there is hope! Cam­paign Mon­i­tor have started a web­site in con­junc­tion with their “Email Stan­dards Project” — essen­tially a stan­dards advo­cacy web­site. They need your sup­port now more than ever.

FixOutlook.org aims to col­late the community’s dis­con­tent with this deci­sion using Twit­ter to change Microsoft’s pol­icy deci­sion on this one before it’s too late and we’re stuck with yet another five-ten years of infe­rior email authoring!

If you’re a Twit­ter user, it’ll take two sec­onds to retweet and show your support.

Thanks!

Josh

Fix Outlook 2010 website

This is a really impor­tant issue for any­one involved in email mar­ket­ing, and well worth tak­ing the effort to make some noise about. Essen­tially, if we don’t get off this track it’ll be years until it is pos­si­ble to drop sup­port for these infe­rior clients (as is the case with IE6, now) and we’ll all be deal­ing with sub-par mail­ing author­ing, cross-compatibility, and dis­play issues for a while to come.

Get tweet­ing! :)

# by Josh on June 24th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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