Copying settings from Adobe to Publisher?

[AuthorSP]

Hello, I am new to Publisher and a novice with Indesign. I pretty much do my book layouts based on an Indesign chapter file that my publisher gave me. I want to recreate the typeset, leading, spacing, book margins, etc in Publisher and use that going forward. In Indesign I saved the file as a .idml file, then I imported the .idml into Publisher and saved it as a .afpub. The chapter looks great. Just like it did in Indesign. It also includes all the paragraph and text styles that my publisher had in Indesign (most of which I don't use). However, when I try to use the .afpub (or the template I made from it) to recreate a new document and paste in or place the text from a Word document, it does not apply the settings to the new text.

After a lot of poking and undoing, I've decided to try to create a brand new, clean template for my book layouts. I need to copy the details from Indesign, like leading, hyphenation, keep, etc. But the settings don't always match up and I end up swapping back and forth trying to eyeball what is different. Is there a way in Indesign to export the settings to a list on a text file,  or something like that? And also in Publisher, so I can do a side by side comparison? Thanks for any help.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, AuthorSP said:

However, when I try to use the .afpub (or the template I made from it) to recreate a new document and paste in or place the text from a Word document, it does not apply the settings to the new text.

Right, it doesn't apply your settings when Pasting formatted text from another document. It respects the formatting from the source document, overriding the setup in the target document.

It doesn't matter whether you start with a clean Template or not. That is just the way Publisher works.

After you import the text from Word, you can look at the list of Text Styles that were created, and use Find & Replace to locate all the text with each of them, and specify which text style you'd like to use instead.

[AuthorSP]

16 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Right, it doesn't apply your settings when Pasting formatted text from another document. It respects the formatting from the source document, overriding the setup in the target document.

It doesn't matter whether you start with a clean Template or not. That is just the way Publisher works.

After you import the text from Word, you can look at the list of Text Styles that were created, and use Find & Replace to locate all the text with each of them, and specify which text style you'd like to use instead.

Ok, that is good to know. No merging like in Word, apparently.
So the trick now is to identify all the settings in Indesign that I need to apply to Publisher. Is there any sort of 1 to 1 comparison of settings and where to find them? I found some of the settings in Publisher, but not others.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, AuthorSP said:

So the trick now is to identify all the settings in Indesign that I need to apply to Publisher.

Didn't you get them when you imported the IDML file and created your first Template from it?

[AuthorSP]

31 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Didn't you get them when you imported the IDML file and created your first Template from it?

I think so, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting them to apply. Also having trouble getting a word document to properly flow across the Publisher pages. For some reason, the first number of pages will paste, then there will be a gap, then the last page will have more of the text, and it will not expand to new pages for the rest of the text. Really weird. Probably something I am doing wrong. Also, a lot of the settings on the original file don't apply to what I need, so I'd like to ID them and get rid of them.

 

Edited November 17, 2022 by AuthorSP

[walt.farrell]

The problem with flowing could be due to how you have the text frames and the links between them setup.

If you're workign with Paragraph and Character Text Styles, you could open  your IDML document, then save as a .afpub. Then create a new (empty) document and you can use the Text Styles panel (via its settings menu (3 bars)) to import the styles from the saved .afpub document.

 

[AuthorSP]

I'll try that. Thanks!

 

[Old Bruce]

Text Styles from IDML files may have problems. I think there are settings in InDesign that have no analogue in Publishe. 

45 minutes ago, AuthorSP said:

Also having trouble getting a word document to properly flow across the Publisher pages. For some reason, the first number of pages will paste, then there will be a gap, then the last page will have more of the text, and it will not expand to new pages for the rest of the text. Really weird.

Check and see if there are page and or section breaks in the text by turning on Text > Show special Characters.

[AuthorSP]

Thanks, I will.