InDesign for QuarkXPress Users [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Unlinking Imported Text

When you place a text, Word, Excel or RTF file, InDesign creates a link to that file on disk which appears in the Links palette, just as it does when you place a graphics file. You can see the link in the Links palette (choose Links from the Window menu, or press Command-Shift-D/Ctrl-Shift-D to open or close the palette).

This is, of course, very different than XPress. Linking to text files is potentially cool, but in reality it's often just a hassle, and we almost always sever the link by selecting the name of the linked file in the Links palette and selecting Unlink from the palette's flyout menu (see Figure 39-4).

If you don't break the link to the file on disk, and later make changes to this file in your word processor or in Excel, when you reopen the InDesign file, the program alerts you that the linked file has been modified, and asks whether you want to update the link. If you click the button to Fix Links, you'll then get a second dialog box which says, "Edits have been made to this object. You will lose these edits by updating. Update anyway?" If you click Yes (the default), any formatting or edits you have applied to the story in InDesign will be lost. The moral of the story is: Don't update the links unless you haven't changed anything in InDesign or you don't mind repeating the changes you have made.