Adobe InDesign Tagged Text - Manual (Page 5)

1 Last updated 4/21/2010
Adobe InDesign CS5 Tagged Text
You can use tags in Adobe® InDesign® or Adobe InCopy® to import and export formatting attributes with text-only
files. These tags, or codes, indicate style and list definitions as well as the character- and paragraph-level attributes you
want to apply to text.
Tagged text
When you import a tagged text file, InDesign or InCopy reads the tag codes and applies the attributes automatically.
When you export formatted text, you can generate the tag codes so that you can later edit the tags and import the
information with formatting intact.
Formatted InDesign document (left) and exported tagged text file (right), with tags shown in red
Only InDesign and InCopy can read InDesign tags. InDesign cannot read tagged text files formatted in Adobe
PageMaker® and QuarkXPress®.
Import and export tags
All tags begin with the less-than character (<) and end with the greater-than character (>). Type the tag immediately
before the text you want to format. For paragraph-level attributes, type the tag at the start of the paragraph. For
character-level attributes, type the tag at the start of the text you want to change. Most type attributes you specify
remain in effect until you use codes to cancel them or until you apply other attributes. For example, to apply
underlining to one word in a paragraph, you type before the word and after the word.
To learn about using tag codes, export text with tags from a formatted document. Then view the exported text in a
word-processing application or text editor to see how the attributes are transformed into tag codes. You can then edit
and add tags before you import the tagged text file.
Export InDesign text as tagged text
1 Using the Type tool, click an insertion point in the story you want to export, or select the range of text you want to
export.
2 Choose File > Export.
3 For Save As Type (Microsoft® Windows®) or Format (Apple® Mac OS®), select Adobe InDesign Tagged Text.