Copying and Pasting Formatted Text From Modern Applications Into Adobe Indesign CS3

The fact that computers work at all amazes me sometimes. These machines process 1 and 0, on and off, yes and no, and yet our entire world is run by these simple signals.

Sometimes older software doesn't work with newer stuff. My dad was a COBOL programmer most of my life, and his career was spent partly making older programs work with newer ones. 

Microsoft and Intel have made backward compatibility a priority for their two companies since the beginning. For the most part, code designed to run on the first generation Intel x86 processors or on the oldest versions of Windows will run on the latest models or versions. One notable exception to this is anything written for 16-bit Windows or MS-DOS platforms, since the effort to keep them running was not compelling enough for Microsoft to keep it up.

I have an old copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 for Windows. (Thankfully I got it for Windows since the Macintosh version would not run on the latest computers: Apple is not so focused on backward compatibility). While it works very well for being 13 years old, mostly missing a few features from newer versions I wish I had (alas, no spanning text across columns in a text field in InDesign). 

There is one thing that doesn't work as expected though. When I try to paste text into InDesign from a modern web browser I lose the formatting. I don't think this is exactly Adobe's fault since I have the same problem pasting into WordPad. It would appear the data format for the text formatting has changed and these two applications don't understand how to read the new one so they ignore it.

Sometimes using Internet Explorer to open the webpage will solve the problem. This is very convenient since InDesign will create character styles for each formatting tag it finds in the text. This only works, however, on formatting that uses basic HTML tags, such as . This will not work on formatting using a tag to select a different style from the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). InDesign doesn't know how to use CSS (and maybe can't know).

I did find a workaround, though it is kind of a kluge. First, print the webpage to a PDF file. Open the PDF in the copy of Adobe Acrobat that came with the Creative Suite. (I am not sure if this will work with Adobe Acrobat Reader, though if it does it would have to be an older version of it. I tried it with Xodo, my prefered PDF reader application, as well as Chrome and Edge but the formatting didn't work.) Copy the text you are wanting then paste it into InDesign.

You will now have the text with the formatting in the text field. The formatting will be preserved, however we want to move the formatting to a character style so we can manipulate it. 

First, create a character style for each type of formatting you want to preserve since we will be clearing the character level format overrides later. In my case I just wanted all of the italicized text, but if you want the underlined text as well create a style for that. Remember character styles cannot overlap, so if you have multiple formats on the same characters you want to preserve then you will need a character style for that.

Open the find window (Ctrl-F on Windows). At the bottom of the window are two boxes, one says "Find Format" and the other says "Change Format". Click the magnifying glass next to the Find box. A Format Settings window will appear. Select the formatting of one of the character styles you created. Then next to the "Change Format" box click the magnifying glass button and select the character style you created that corresponds to the formatting you selected. Click the "Find" button a few times to make sure your results are what you expected, then click "Change All" when you are confident.

Your text will now have a character style applied to the parts with that formatting. Repeat for all the different types of formatting you want to preserve.