Linking Text Files but keep formatting - is there a way to accomplish?

[Megalion]

I'm brand new to InDesign (and to desktop publishing). But I'm a web developer who does a lot of database driven stuff which is how/why I'm thinking in these terms that my question is about below.

My Task is to put together a tour diary scrapbook for a band and its street teamers and I decided on using InDesign because when I was researching printing options, I kept seeing the name and all that.

Ok so here's the thing... I was reading about linked graphics and linked text and one of my problems is that I don't have all the final content yet.

For example, I don't know exactly how everyone wants to be credited for their photos.

What I'd like to be able to do is
Place a Photo
Place a linked Photo Caption underneath (ie. "Mickey.txt")

I do this for all of "Mickey's" photos in the book and when I get confirmation as to how he should be credited... update the text file and then update all the links to that text file in InDesign.

Now... the problem is I understand that InDesign automatically drops any formatting applied to that textframe.

I have a paragraph style called "PhotoCredit" that I set the photocredit text frames to. It reverts to "[Basic Paragraph]" after update link.

QUESTION:
Is there anyway to accomplish what I want without getting the style reset each time?

Somewhere I saw a reference to someone talking about InDesign being robust enough to handle the authoring of a book that's got multiple people working on it. For example several authors working on different sections of the content and then the book designer (or two) working on the layout/design. It indicated that somehow there was a way to separate design from content so that the designer could go ahead and work/apply formatting to content even if the author of that particular content is still editing/revising it.

I was looking at the Tags feature just now to see if there was a way I could just write the formatting code in my linked text file so that instead of having to apply my paragraph styling to the text frame, InDesign imports styling information as well as the updated text content. But it doesn't seem to be for that purpose...

A lot of the terminology is new to me so perhaps I just don't know the right words to search for to find my answers.

Am hoping that you guys can at least point me in the right direction or confirm that I can/can not do what I'm trying to do.

Thanks!

disclaimer: I did use the Search function and looked for threads about linked text but only found 9 hits, none of which addressed my particular question. Pardon if I missed something obvious.

 

[jmgalvin]

If you're importing from Word, you can choose to retain the Word formatting in the Place dialogue.

If you bring the stuff into INDD with little or no formatiing you can apply formatiing later by using Find/Change. That allows you to find and change all occurrnaces of things like a font, character style, paragraph style. etc.

So let's say you just bring the stuff in as 10pt Courier. You can use Find/Change to find 10pt Courier and then change to Helvetica Neue Narrow Light 8pt with kerning reduced by 25% and leading reduced to 8pt, Character width inreased by 50% and height reduced 25% all in the color blue. There's actually quite a bit more, but I assume you get the idea.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[Megalion]

That's a thought.

Right now I was planning to just use plain text files.

Is there anyway to tag the particular text frames in a way that I can Find/Change all instances of that tag/marker?

I don't think the actual Tag function works that way/for that purpose as far as I understand it at this point.

 

[jmgalvin]

OK, let me be more clear.

If you place plain text into INDD it will appear as whatever default font you have selected for INDD. In my case that's 12 pt Helvetica Neue Roman T1. That holds whether you place it as a link or embed the text.

As long as you don't use that default font for other parts of the indd document, the character format will serve as a tag for find/change.

So you'd find 12 pt Helvetica Neue Roman T1 and, let's say, change to red 9pt Times bold T1 with character height increased 20% and width decreased 10%, etc, etc. (INDD allows all sort of styles both character and paragraph - sort of like CSS on web but much more extravagent).

In the Find/Change window you click Change All and all instances of 12 pt Helvetica Neue Roman T1 are changed to whatever you decided on.




Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4