The intrepid newcomer and ominously named dekeWorld dweller, bware, was reading a post I did way back when this site was still spitting up pixel-based formula about how to customize placeholder text in InDesign. This morning, Bware wrote:

“InDesign ignores the return characters in my placeholder.txt file.”

So I checked it out myself and had the same experience. All the carriage returns in my placeholder document were gone. So after trying a few useless ideas, I sent out the call for help to those keepers of the InDesign mysteries, David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion. A little while later, David emailed that he had a suggestion and because he was getting some similar queries he had put it here on their site, which should really be called:

David’s suggested solution to the problem that bware and I were experiencing was to…

...place the text in InDesign (using the technique I showed you), then put the hard returns into the file and Export the text back out of InDesign into a properly encoded text file. A coupla things to note:

• You appear to have to be actively in the text frame with the text tool order to get the option to export a .txt file.
• Choose File > Export. Then choose Text Only in the Format field (which in my case was there by default). If you don’t have the Text Only option, see my previous note.

  

• In the Text Export Options dialog box, I went with setting the encoding to Default Platform.

  

• Save it over your old Placeholder.txt file in the InDesign application folder.
• Next time you use InDesign’s Type > Fill with Placeholder command, you should have all the returns intact.

Thanks bware for bringing this up, and thanks David for revealing the secret.