Text clipped when copying from InDesign table to Word

[mikeAtJB]

Whenever a table is copied from InDesign and pasted into Word, the first letter of the table title is always clipped. Sometimes it happens to the Source: text, too. Any ideas on how to fix this? I have hundreds of tables to do and I'm afraid of missing one of the corrections. Notice in the screenshots below, the U has been removed.

InDesign:

Word:

[Barb Binder]

I'm not able to replicate this issue. How are you selecting the table?

[mikeAtJB]

I click in any cell, go to the Table drop-down, then "Select", then "Table." I then copy (this is a Mac), and paste in Word. The character between the "Table 7-1" and the actual Table Title is an en space. It seems to drop the charcter in the Source line when the character is an en space, too. I'm using Sierra 10.12.5, InDesign CC 2017, and Word for Mac 15.35.

[Barb Binder]

I'm on Mac 10.11.6, otherwise the same setup. Are you using Bullets and Numbering for the table numbers and for the word Source, or are they typed in manually?

[mikeAtJB]

In this instance, they are typed in manually. I've had other books though that this has happened with and Bullets and Numbering were used.

[Jongware]

Are you sure it is InDesign, or could it also be your Word? You can test by pasting the table into anything else that accepts formatted text – TextEdit ought to do.

[mikeAtJB]

I don't think it's Word. I pasted into TextEdit and the same thing happened.

[Barb Binder]

I can't recreate it on my end. It is a new issue with Sierra, or has this always happened?

[mikeAtJB]

I'm pretty sure it's the en space. I replaced the en space with a regular space and it didn't happen. I reinserted the en space and the next letter dropped out in both Word and TextEdit. It was happening before Sierra (with Yosemite) but I don't remember it happening before Yosemite.

[Barb Binder]

Mike, first of all, please accept my apology. I don't know how I tested this yesterday because I closed the files last night (and I did test yesterday) but I tried one more time just to grab screen shots for you, and this time I experienced exactly what you described.

InDesign on El Capitan:

Word:

Following up on JongWare's note, here in TextEdit:

And Excel:

Then I tried FrameMaker (Adobe's other page layout application). FrameMaker only runs under Windows, so I have Win 10 installed on my MacBook. They share a clipboard so I kept pasting. This was the first one to work as expected:

So did Word for Windows:

This is enough screen shots, but I did paste the table into both versions of Acrobat Pro DC. The Mac version clipped the first character, the Windows version did not. All this confirms your suspicion that the en space is the issue, but I don't know where it leaves you. You are on a Mac, and it seems to be Mac related, but I don't know that we can put the blame on InDesign, since the table pastes as expected in the three Windows applications. All I can do is validate your intuition, and then suggest not using the en space.

[mikeAtJB]

Thanks for your time on this. I don't have much of a choice in using the en space. These are all files that were created some time ago and on the reprints, the authors are requesting tables to be pulled from the book and recreated in Word. I could try a search and replace for the en space as a last resort.

[Barb Binder]

So for that workflow, I think I'd recommend the same thing. When the author requests a reprint, open the file and use a previously-saved F/C query to replace the en space with a space, copy/paste, close without saving. It would be pretty quick and eliminates the potential for a missing first letter.

And always happy to help, and so sorry to have thrown you off-track yesterday.