Placeholder text and importing Word, RTF and Markdown into Layout

Design often starts before the words exist. A magazine template, a brochure for a client who hasn't written the copy yet, a book interior where the author is still on chapter nine: in all of these you need text in the frames to judge the look. Layout by Zaweba can fill a frame with placeholder text, then swap it for the real thing when it arrives as a text, Rich Text, Word or Markdown file.

At the other end of a job it can also export a story as text, so the final wording can go back to the writer or into another system without anyone retyping it from a PDF.

Filling frames with placeholder text

Placeholder text fills the selected frame so you can see how a paragraph style looks across real column widths and line lengths. Use it to set leading, hyphenation and justification before the copy comes in. A body style tested on a full column of placeholder text behaves very differently from one tested on two lines, and it is much easier to spot loose lines, rivers or bad breaks in a full frame.

Put it into threaded frames to see how a story will run across pages, and into captions and pull quotes to check their sizes. Just remember it is there. A sentence of placeholder text left in a caption is one of the classic errors that slips through to print, so read every frame before export.

Importing text from other programs

The import reads .txt, .rtf, .docx and .md files.

Word files bring the most with them. Styles in the .docx are mapped to the document's styles, so a writer's Heading 1 can become your feature headline style and their Normal can become your body text. Tables come across and pictures are anchored in the text where they were, and Word comments can arrive as notes. That is a lot of manual work saved on a long article or a book chapter.

Rich Text is a good middle ground when a writer uses a program that doesn't save Word files. Plain text is the cleanest of all: no formatting at all, just words, which you then style in Layout. Markdown suits writers who work in plain text editors and mark up headings and emphasis as they go, so the structure is there without any stray formatting.

Getting a clean import

Agree with writers how they mark headings. If every heading in the Word file uses the same named style, the mapping does the rest. If headings are just bold body text, nothing can tell them apart from the paragraph after, and you'll be applying styles by hand.

Set up your paragraph styles before you import, so the mapping has somewhere to send things. A document with only the default style gives the import nothing to aim at.

Watch out for writers who use spaces or repeated returns for layout. Those come through faithfully and are better removed with find and change, which can work with GREP patterns for exactly this kind of tidy up.

If the text is still changing, consider linking it instead of importing a one off copy. Layout can keep an imported story linked to its file, so a revised file can be read in again later.

Sending a story back out as text

Export a story as text when the final, corrected version needs to leave the layout. Proofreaders sometimes prefer to read plain text, a website may need the copy for an online version, and an archive is easier to search when the words are stored on their own. Exporting from the layout means the text is the version that was actually printed, with every late correction in it, rather than an older draft from someone's email.

Placeholder to final in one document

The rhythm of a job then looks like this. Set up styles and frames, fill them with placeholder text to tune the design, import the writer's file and let the styles map across, clear up the leftovers, and export the finished story when it's signed off. Each step happens in the same document, and none of it needs a second program.