Unknown said:

I can only see about 1/3 of the text in the idml file. I am operating from a trial version of Adobe InDesign. In the "Layers" tab on the top right corner, however, it displayed only one layer.

Do you perhaps have an idea what caused that?

I have no idea... not familiar enough with InDesign to hazard a guess either.  Presumably you see all the layers if you open the source?  Can you switch on the layers in the target and export a file correctly?

Hi Julian, hi Paul,

I used to work frequently with InDesign, a good few years back. The content you 'cannot see' may be on the 'pasteboard' - an area surrounding the InDesign pages where you can see what you have deliberately copied/cut and pasted to it from the document. Pasteboard content is not on a different layer, it's all visible on the 'top layer'.

So, When moving text about in InDesign, you can cut and paste as usual but it is also possible to take text to the pasteboard around the side so that it is visibly available for future use but won't appear in the current document as published.

This is a feasible explanation for what is happening, I think. If so, it's all there but you just can't see it if you only look at the document itself in InDesign. To find out, shrink the zoom % so it shows the area outside of the pages and you will see the texts that are 'missing'.

The client may want this text translated for future use and/or may have forgotten/not realised the pasteboard content would show up in the translation file... InDesign is such a good piece of kit, it is probably possible to only export the document content to IDML, I forget... 

Of course, there's also the possibility that two text boxes are superimposed or that a 'text box' hasn't been 'dragged' large enough to show all the content. You can see when this is the case because a little red 'x' is displayed bottom right of the 'text box' - these 'text boxes' can also be linked so that content flows between them, even if they're not on the same page or 'page spread' or on consecutive pages. Then, you'd have to use search and find for the next text you can't see...

Hope this helps,
Ali :))

Hi Alison,

you are right... This might be one reason.

And to visualize what you suggested, see the following image.

I have copied and pasted in another text frame the first paragraph and I have positioned it in the "Pasteboard".

When I look at the INDD (or IDML) document in Adobe InDesign in "Normal view" (top screenshot) I see what I have copied and pasted in the Pasteboard text frame.

But if I look at the same document in "Preview" (bottom screenshot) this same text disappears (but it is still present in the INDD/IDML file).

Claudio