[CS4] Word Import severely broken

Question

(Not a question, rather an observation...)
The Word import has gone from already rather bad to worse with one of the upgrade patches. Two major nuisances that don't seem to have been present from the initial version (based on "we'd surely have noticed this earlier"; they also are definitely not present in CS3!):
Random paragraphs are cut off at the end, continuing on the same line with the next paragraph. The cut-off part appears at the very end of the imported text -- including its hard return. So when I see some stray words at the end I know I have to scan the entire document by eye to find where they came from. Entirely random -- reading a same file twice, or on a different computer or platform, will have the same error but on a different place.
Importing a Word document no longer reads text point size correctly. Sometimes entire paragraphs are in the wrong point size -- at random, not simply using the wrong style or something like that. This is extremely bad, as my firm relies on point size for proper automated formatting.
Rather random -- some paragraphs will be wrong on other computers, some are wrong at random.
This is not limited to one platform; all our computers, Mac and Windows, Leopard, Snow Leopard as well as XP (SP3) will all import a certain file with these errors. Of course all systems are fully patched up to 6.0.4.
It's also not limited to .doc files. Saving the file as .rtf has the exact same symptoms: in Word, all is fine & dandy, in CS4 the text and formatting gets garbled.
A working kludge is to import suspicious documents into CS3, save, open in CS4 and go from there. Hardly a solution.

Answer 1

[Jongware] wrote:
I found that a troublesome document keeps being troublesome ... saved as .doc, rtf, or docx. At any time, something or the other goes wrong with the very same document: cut off bits and pieces of text, footnotes that go haywire, formatting out of whack, text cut off immediately following a table ... And so on. So as soon as I see it happen on a particular doc, I import it into CS3, save, open that in CS4 and copy the text out of it. No problem anymore.
I filed a bug report to Adobe Tech services. Sent one of my Word docs with it, along with a CS4 file showing the problem of bits of text coming in at the end. They went over those files for a week and reported back "The change in text runs is because (a) the page size and margins of your Word file do not match that of your InDesign file, and (b) because of different layout and formatting options, the text may not run the same even if so." That made me laugh. Until I cried.
Thanks for the CS3 solution.
The mismatched margins issue sounds bogus to me. If stuff shows up at the end of file, out of sequence, it's most likely because the particular version of Word in which the original file was created got confused about managing incremental edits, and the file was "fast saved," which keeps the file content and changes in chronological order of creation, and uses pointers to mark what's added and what's to be deleted or ignored. Some versions of Word were so bad at this that even Word itself couldn't interpret the mishmash when opening a fast-saved file of its own.
A good practice that I don't recall seeing mentioned on these forums is, if possible, to make sure to save the Word file to a new name in Word, before converting or placing it in InDesign. Just as InDesign does, saving to a new name reorders the file content and cleans out the spaghetti pointers. I believe that InDesign's spaghetti doesn't go bad so often as Word's, but it's always a good idea to save to a new name periodically. It's possible that some problems that affect exchanging INX files are related to the reliance on pointers to keep a file in order.
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices