Tagged Text Glitch in InDesign
Adobe InDesign offers you WYSIWYG page-layout capabilities that provide advanced control of graphic designs for print and Web use. The program's tagged-text coding system enables you to export text from and import text into your layout files, complete with typographic styles and attributes. You can use tagged text to simplify external edits, share formatted text among members of a work group and study the tagging codes so you can create tagged text from scratch. The tagging language demands strict adherence to its formatting codes, and any violation of the rules can produce unexpected results or damage your layout files.
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Beginning a Tagged Document
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Adobe InDesign tagged-text files consist of readable text: letters, numbers and basic punctuation. Each file begins with a special start-up tag that specifies the operating system under which you created it, immediately followed by setup tags that state the file's tagged-text version, feature set, the colors it references and the RGB or CMYK formulas to produce them, along with the layout's styles and lists. All these elements must be present and formatted correctly for the file to import properly into an InDesign layout file.
Tag Structure
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Adobe InDesign formatting tags surround blocks of text with shared attributes. These can be as small as an individual character or as large as complete paragraphs or entire tables. Tags can nest within each other, just as InDesign's local formatting enables you to typeset one word in italics in the midst of a paragraph that uses a non-oblique typeface. Each tag begins with a greater-than symbol and ends with a less-than symbol, bracketing off the extent to which the tag applies. The tags for special characters such as bullets and typographer's quotes use hexadecimal encoding. Although you may have to look up the meanings of individual tags to understand the formatting they produce, you can read the entire file.
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Formatting Errors
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Although Adobe InDesign doesn't err when it exports tagged text from your files, you may introduce errors when you edit tagged text outside of InDesign so you can import it back in with type corrections or coding changes. These mistakes can range from simple typographical errors to improper or incomplete coding. From a missing tag bracket to a missing tag, all format-tagging errors bring your tagged-text import to a halt. InDesign displays the "Adobe InDesign Tagged Text Import" dialogue box, which locates your error by line number and describes the problem. If you click on the "Continue" button and bring in poorly tagged content, your imported text may stop before the location of the coding error.
Special Codes
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If you edit an Adobe InDesign tagged-text document to add or change the hexadecimal codes used to insert special characters and accidentally introduce an error into your coding, your mistake probably won't halt or truncate the import process when you bring your text back into InDesign. Instead, you'll see either the wrong character -- if you typed a valid tag code that's simply the wrong one to produce the character you want -- or a box with an "X" through it to represent encoding that's invalid. You can use InDesign's "Find/Change" features to find these errors by copying one of the X-marker characters to the clipboard and pasting it into the "Find" field. You also can use the InDesign spell checker to find these errors if they introduce spelling mistakes, which the X-markers usually do. Because these errors don't typically trigger an error message, you must remember to look for them.
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References
Resources
- Real World InDesign CS5; Olav Martin Kvern, et al.
- InDesign CS5 Bible; Galen Gruman
- Photo Credit Brand X Pictures/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images
