Export InDesign to Word

[Alan Clarke]

Greetings : I have been in this and other groups like it for decades, stealthy of late, but am now beginning to “age out” 

A long-time client is looking to take over a job I have been doing for years, with my blessing. It started out in PageMaker and then InDesign, output as a printed handbook, then we also published it as a PDF online, then we dropped the printed book but still kept the PDF book format. 

Now the newer and younger are coming of age and they want to put it online only, but they want it in Word so they can edit it through the school year. 

Traditionally they give it to me in Word as one long document, cobbled together from several se3ctions of the school. I place it into InDesign, format it, and output it as a low-grade PDF for the web. I do not see any way to export an InDesign document into Word, assuming we could solve all other font and format problems. But this is new to me and I suspect some of you might have some suggestions. I have never used Word but I do use Pages when needed. 

It’s a tech school but I think most of their clerical staff use PCs. 

Anyway, this is my first foray into such madness and if anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear them. I do have time to experiment. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Alan

Alan F. Clarke

boz...@mac.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dangerous is the lion’s lair,

even when the lion’s not there!

                           --Caius Marius 

[Ann Farr]

Hi,

As you have the PDF book, I’d suggest this (and I’ve had a few years of not-good-at-all!). Open the PDF, go to File > Export to > NOT Microsoft Word! but click on Rich Text Format. For me this absolutely does the trick and you can set Settings depending upon whether you want just the text, the same format, images etc. It seems quite fast and the book publisher I work for likes these results having found the not-good-at-all SS Word just horrendous.

Anyway, I hope this works for you.

Ann

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[R Evans]

Also, make it easy on yourself by creating a pdf with nothing you need to delete in Word: no running heads, page numbers, discretionary hyphens (turn off hyphenation before exporting the pdf), decorative elements in the design, and so on. 

All you want is the text itself and it doesn’t matter whether/how the InDesign document reflows. 

If the document includes tables and figures, it might be easier to copy and paste them directly from InDesign to Word and remove them from the InDesign file before export to pdf.

Rebecca Evans

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/indesign-talk/91F5AE26-AF6A-484E-B1AB-8502B6EEA927%40gmail.com.

[Sharon Villines]

Oddly, cut and paste works very well from PDFs to Word or Pages. I’ve been told that Pages actually exports to webpages more easily and accurately than Word, but it is Mac only, I think.

Sharon

[Alan Clarke]

Wow! Thank you all very much. I will spend the next few days trying these suggestions. 

I’ll let you know how I make out.

Great group. Aways has been.

Alan

On Jul 21, 2023, at 12:24 PM, R Evans <forsal...@gmail.com> wrote:

Also, make it easy on yourself by creating a pdf with nothing you need to delete in Word: no running heads, page numbers, discretionary hyphens (turn off hyphenation before exporting the pdf), decorative elements in the design, and so on. 

All you want is the text itself and it doesn’t matter whether/how the InDesign document reflows. 

If the document includes tables and figures, it might be easier to copy and paste them directly from InDesign to Word and remove them from the InDesign file before export to pdf.

Rebecca Evans

On Jul 21, 2023, at 10:06 AM, Ann Farr <camill...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

As you have the PDF book, I’d suggest this (and I’ve had a few years of not-good-at-all!). Open the PDF, go to File > Export to > NOT Microsoft Word! but click on Rich Text Format. For me this absolutely does the trick and you can set Settings depending upon whether you want just the text, the same format, images etc. It seems quite fast and the book publisher I work for likes these results having found the not-good-at-all SS Word just horrendous.

Anyway, I hope this works for you.

Ann

On 21 Jul 2023, at 16:57, 'Alan Clarke' via InDesign talk <indesi...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Greetings : I have been in this and other groups like it for decades, stealthy of late, but am now beginning to “age out” 

A long-time client is looking to take over a job I have been doing for years, with my blessing. It started out in PageMaker and then InDesign, output as a printed handbook, then we also published it as a PDF online, then we dropped the printed book but still kept the PDF book format. 

Now the newer and younger are coming of age and they want to put it online only, but they want it in Word so they can edit it through the school year. 

Traditionally they give it to me in Word as one long document, cobbled together from several se3ctions of the school. I place it into InDesign, format it, and output it as a low-grade PDF for the web. I do not see any way to export an InDesign document into Word, assuming we could solve all other font and format problems. But this is new to me and I suspect some of you might have some suggestions. I have never used Word but I do use Pages when needed. 

It’s a tech school but I think most of their clerical staff use PCs. 

Anyway, this is my first foray into such madness and if anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear them. I do have time to experiment. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Alan

Alan F. Clarke

boz...@mac.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dangerous is the lion’s lair,

even when the lion’s not there!

                           --Caius Marius 

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[Alan Clarke]

Thanks for the help last week, group. I’m going to go one more year with this project, as I have for 20 years, while we/they figure out how to do it in the future. Right now they want to just input it into Word, gather up all the sections, format it in Word and see if it comes out anything like they are used to. It was interesting looking at the results from exporting various formats from Acrobat but there is no sense getting it all the way to a PDF if they will not have the staff to do it each year. Into Word, worked in Word, and out of Word. We’ll see. Thanks again. — Alan

[David Creamer]

Coming in late, but with most schools using Chromebooks and students/teachers have Google accounts, I wonder why they don't use Google apps. They can collaborate in Docs (similar to Word), Slides (similar to PowerPoint), and Sites (website builder) --to name a few. With Sites, they can build a website and even point a custom domain to it. This could use the text from your document (in Word/RTF) and the exported graphics from the PDF.

David Creamer

IDEAS Training

[Alan Clarke]

This is a different situation. It is an annual student handbook with various changes throughout the school year. I used to put it out as a printed book, then they went to putting it online as a PDF also, then just the PDF. It is just to be read by the students, no back and forth. Not a part of the curriculum. This is a way to pass it on as I “age out” after some 30+ years. Just finding a way that does not require it as a PDF any longer and is editable on the fly, as needed. (almost HTML but with a better look.) Right now they have mostly Word people on staff so we’re seeing how it goes. 

Thanks, David, for the advice though.—afc

Alan F. Clarke
boz...@mac.com

[creamer...@gmail.com]

As I understand it, how it used to be done doesn’t really affect how it will be done I the future. So the key phrase is: Just finding a way that does not require it as a PDF any longer and is editable on the fly, as needed. Having it online would solve that problem. Either Slides or Sites would work; access could be given to a group of editors, while view-only access could be given to the public viewers.

 

Another option could be Publisher. Many Microsoft Office subscriptions include Microsoft Publisher, which would be a better choice. Word users would be able to pick it up pretty quickly.

 

Dave Creamer

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[Alan Clarke]

That sounds interesting. Let me take a look at Publisher. That might add the missing formatting that would push it over the top. Thanks. 

Sent from my Bozophone

On Jul 27, 2023, at 9:44 AM, creamer...@gmail.com wrote:



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