Adobe InCopy CS2 - How to Import Non-native Documents into InCopy

Learn about importing non-native documents into InCopy in this Adobe InCopy CS2 training video.

Video Transcription

Now, the next thing we are going to address is the reality that if you are just learning InCopy, it is likely that you have a lot of legacy documents in other formats. Those might be in Microsoft Word documents, RTF or even just plain text. Previous versions of InCopy allowed you to place those legacy file formats but InCopy CS2 allows you to do something new and much better. That is directly open those files, those Word, those text and those RTF files. So just choose File Open and we have several versions of the same document. It is the portrait file that is saved in the Lesson Two Folder. It is inside the Part One Folder, inside of the Projects File Folder. It is the same content saved in different format. So we have a Word document, an RTF version and a plain text version. Before we are done with this lesson, we will look at all three but we are going to start with the Word document. So we can open those files directly by selecting them and clicking open. Now you probably thought that was going to be an easy process but all of a sudden, you are hit with this huge dialog box. Bare with me, it is not as overwhelming as it looks. Let us just take a quick browse to this dialog and I think you are going to get a good grasp out of it. So at the top here, we have several options for things to include when we are opening a Word document. And, for folks dealing especially with book publishing, this part is going to be really important. This allows you to decide whether or not you include your table of contents, index, footnotes and end notes that might already exist in your Word document. You can leave all of them on, turn all of them off or choose which ones you would like to import. The second section here is related to quotation marks. So by default, it is set to use typographer’s quotes, again, those are the curly quotes instead of the down straight quotes that look more like fitting inch marks. Normally, we leave those on. Then in the bottom here, we have a couple of formatting options in which one you use depends on how the writer of the original Word document formatted their text. In some cases, you will have a writer that uses all sorts of manual overrides in formatting and all sorts of crazy stuff in the Word. If you would like to eliminate all of that formatting and just have a plain text version, and you would choose the first option which is to remove styles in formatting from text in tables. If you would like, you can preserve local overrides. But normally, if you are going to remove the styles in formatting, I will just blow everything away. You also have the choice if you have for example a table inside of your Word document. You can also choose whether you convert the table to unformatted tables or if you really want a dummy down, you can convert those Word tables to unformatted tab text which you can manipulate further later. Normally, I just leave them as unformatted tables for I like the benefits of the table structure. Now, if for some reason you do not want to eliminate all the formatting and you would rather preserve some of the formatting that was created in Microsoft Word, and the second option is your best – and this will preserve styles and formatting from text and tables. There are a couple of other items here that you also need to be aware of. The first one is manual page breaks. So many has used Microsoft Word as a page design tool, it is something I recommend but you know what happens? If you used Microsoft Word in that way and you may want to preserve page breaks, that are if there are page breaks in the Word document that are really important, you can let those persist into InCopy. You could choose to convert the page breaks to column breaks but in most cases, because I am using InCopy as a part of a larger workflow, or somebody is using InDesign, it actually is going to take care of the page breaks in the layout and you only set that to no breaks. So, that just removes the manual page breaks. You also have choices over importing in line graphics and importing unused styles. So in-line graphics basicall