Turn on suggestions
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Exit
OsakaWebbie
Engaged
OsakaWebbie
Engaged
Activity
Dec 15, 2024
03:51 AM
Thanks for the in-depth list of suggestions... 1. I have no interest in changing the order of comments - ordered by location within the document is perfectly fine. 2. Way too much work. These documents are for proofreading a magazine, not kept for posterity. 3. I was hoping someone who already knows scripting might have done it - I don't have the skills to try that. 4. It shouldn't be necessary to ask our whole team to learn a new tool just because of this one annoyance - I suspect that abandoning Adobe would have downsides also. 5. Okay, I wrote a request - please vote for it here: https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/49219289-list-replies-to-a-comment-in-chronological-order
... View more
Jul 09, 2024
06:13 PM
Probably, although the most advanced part of your script by far (detecting "chapters" in the middle of threaded text) is unnecessary in my case and is probably the main cause for the $59 pricetag. If someone is writing a book with a lot of chapters, it would be well worth what you're charging - it's just not that critical to me. (By the way, I love the name Unjustified for this - clever!) Also, I'd like to keep these projects portable - that is, I want to be able to hand them off to others who might come along and want to help. So I'm hoping for something that would not only not cost money but also just work behind the scenes (baked into the object style) rather than needing to be installed and then run each time the document changes. Apparently this is not some setting I was overlooking, since both of you who have responded are talking about scripts and space-filling klooges. I think "Top Justified" (or whatever they would want to call it) should be a capability of ID itself, but that might be a pipe dream.
... View more
Jul 09, 2024
05:55 PM
...you would probably not be able to tell. Yes I would - ID would say the document has errors and would warn me every time I make a PDF. And it could become like the boy who cried wolf - I might get desensitized to the big red dot at the bottom, and confirm PDF warnings that I shouldn't. I could easily miss something I really need to fix, even in other types of document that doesn't have this issue.
... View more
Jul 08, 2024
11:58 PM
In the same way that the Alignment setting for paragraphs can be "Left Justify" vs. "Full Justify", is there a way to set a text frame's vertical alignment to do something like "Top Justify", so that frames that have content flowing to the next threaded frame are justified but the last frame in the story is not? I use object styles for text frames in various repeating projects (e.g. a quarterly newsletter) that have threaded stories that should normally justify to the top and bottom of the frame, and I get tired of changing the last frame to Top and also making sure no others are accidentally still set to Top from previous content that might have filled a different number of frames. Here's a simple example of what I mean: On the left, both frames are align=justify, but the on right, the second frame is align=top. I would prefer not to have to do that manually all the time.
... View more
Jul 03, 2024
01:27 AM
Nice detective work. I downloaded, imported, and ran that 2009 fixup, and it does appear to do what it says even in 2024. However, I was surprised to discover that the file size didn't change as much as I expected. In my case (something I do quarterly), I have a four-page A4 newsletter that I build as two A3 pages for printing, then I want to upload it to our website as a four-page PDF. So I export from InDesign as pages "1,2,2,1" and then crop half off each of those pages. Since all the content is duplicated (including images) and then half is cropped away and then removed by the fixup, I expected the file size to drop close to half. But it merely reduced from 670kB to 649kB. Hmm...
... View more
Jun 25, 2024
12:59 AM
Wow, that was easy! I didn't see that checkbox, and I must have been using all the wrong search words when trying to find the answer myself. I'm not sure what your second paragraph is about (I didn't ask for varying rule/border behavior - consistency is good), but that checkbox was the key I was looking for. Thanks!
... View more
Jun 22, 2024
06:00 PM
The composite image below is almost self-explanatory. I am finalizing the design of a people directory that uses tagged text generated from a database to automatically assign paragraph styles when placed. To delineate a new letter of the alphabet, I use a paragraph style with extra spacing and a "rule above" as shown here. It works great when the new letter hits in the middle of a column (green circle), but if it hits at the top of a column (red circle), the rule is in the margin. I understand why that's happening ("space before" is ignored at the top of text frames, which is normally good), but is there something I can do in the paragraph style settings to force the content down so the rule is at the top of the frame instead of floating where it shouldn't be? Yes, I know I can manually lower the top of the frame after placing the text, and I'll do that if necessary. But it would be nice if it just worked, so that there are no overrides in the parent page's text frames that would need fixing after placing freshly updated tagged text, which would no doubt have such rules in different places. It would probably look a little better if the rule was at the bottom of columns instead of the top when the letter change happens at a column break, but that would require significantly more cleverness in the code that creates the tagged text, because the code would need to look ahead and see what the next name is, not just remember the previous one. And even if I did that, I'd still have this layout problem in InDesign, because the "rule below" would be in the bottom margin.
... View more
Jun 07, 2024
09:02 PM
I figured it out, and I think this is a bug (or at least a deficiency) in InDesign. It will not find styles that are in folders! I had apparently tidied up my styles after the last time I imported, so I didn't realize that it would no longer work. I took the styles out of the folder, and everything worked fine.
... View more
Jun 07, 2024
08:45 PM
I tried saving as IDML and reopening to give the document a bath. No change. I then tried starting with a fresh new document and copy/pasting a few lines of text from the real document just so the new doc would have the necessary styles. It still didn't work. As for trying a different version of InDesign, I'm hesitant to upgrade at the moment because I'm in the final stages of production of a magazine (unrelated to this project) - I try to avoid upgrading software when deadlines are looming. That will probably be done in about a week, and then I won't mind experimenting. It's so strange that it worked fine in April but now it fails with the exact same files (both the document and the tagged text file that were used then) and no changes to InDesign that I'm aware of.
... View more
Jun 05, 2024
08:22 PM
A couple months ago I worked out the kinks of using "tagged text" to get paragraph styles and character styles applied automatically to imported text. For background, see this thread. At the time, experimentation demonstrated that I didn't need to define the styles in the text file as long as the styles were already defined in the ID document. Everything was working fine. But now I'm coming back to this project, and suddenly InDesign is complaining that it can't find the paragraph styles in a "paragraph table". Here is a MWE: <UNICODE-WIN>
<pstyle:Alpha Line 1><cstyle:Alpha initial>E<cstyle:><cstyle:Alpha name>LLRICK, Karen<cstyle:> 1996 IND
<pstyle:Alpha Rom address><cstyle:Member symbol>¬<cstyle:>
<pstyle:Alpha right><cstyle:No break>エルリック<cstyle:> And here is a screenshot of the error popup I'm getting: If I add simple definitions to the file, like this (modeled after the definitions in the other thread's answer, which were not needed in my experience): <UNICODE-WIN>
<DefineParaStyle:Alpha Line 1=<Nextstyle:Alpha Line 1>>
<DefineParaStyle:Alpha Rom address=<Nextstyle:Alpha Rom address>>
<DefineParaStyle:Alpha right=<Nextstyle:Alpha right>>
<pstyle:Alpha Line 1><cstyle:Alpha initial>E<cstyle:><cstyle:Alpha name>LLRICK, Karen<cstyle:> 1996 IND
<pstyle:Alpha Rom address><cstyle:Member symbol>¬<cstyle:>
<pstyle:Alpha right><cstyle:No break>エルリック<cstyle:> Then it no longer complains about the styles, but it creates new paragraph styles with none of the formatting I want. I don't want to create new styles - everything is already nicely defined and organized in the document I'm importing into. Curiously, it is not complaining about character styles and is correctly using the ones in the document. Only paragraph styles are having this problem. Any clues? My ID version is 19.0.1 x64, and I'm pretty sure it has not be upgraded during the couple months I wasn't looking at this.
... View more
Apr 04, 2024
05:01 AM
I already tried "<cnxc:Page>" (see the original post) - it did not work for me for some reason. I could try the verbose version, but I'm no longer working on this - I set up a paragraph style and moved on.
... View more
Apr 04, 2024
01:33 AM
For those who read this later, it's not "Break Options", but "Keep Options". The last setting, "Start Paragraph:" defaults to "Anywhere" but can be changed to "Next page" or several other choices. This wasn't exactly an answer to my question (I agree with the recommendation in general and am a big fan of using styles, but in the workflow of this particular project, a literal page break would have been fine and even a little simpler), but since no one answered that (perhaps it's not possible on import but only export), I did end up implementing it with a special paragraph style as suggested.
... View more
Mar 27, 2024
07:56 AM
1 Upvote
Im preparing tagged text for importing into InDesign, but I can't get page breaks to work. As a test, I put a page break in a text document and exported as tagged text, and the page break was rendered as: <cnxc:Page> But using that in a file I'm importing doesn't result in a page break. Thoughts?
... View more
Mar 23, 2024
08:06 PM
1 Upvote
Like I've suspected - ALIGN RIGHT does the trick: Wow, I didn't even think to try a right-justified paragraph with a Right Indent Tab (or normal tab to a right-aligned tab stop)! I completely assumed that with all that "right" stuff, nothing would start on the left. That's why I kept talking of wishing there was a Left Indent Tab or something. Who knew?! (apparently you did 👍) But there is a problem in 3rd case - too long 1st part: Can you check length of the 1st part when exporting from a database? As I said, I'm not too worried about the 3rd case, as the number of occurrences is very low. Yes, I can (and will) have my export code check the number of characters in the name, but that isn't an exact prediction of how wide it will be in a variable-spaced font, and the column width and/or font size could change also. I would only use the character count as an alert to tell me to check it in InDesign and adjust manually if necessary. And your idea with using Right Indent Tab - won't always work correctly anyway: That didn't happen with this exact text in my font and column width, but indeed, it happened when I removed a couple letters from the name - thanks for the warning. But I would still prefer not to have to choose a fixed location for a tab stop (in case we decide to change the column width). Instead, I can just export a couple spaces after the name (before the Right Indent Tab) to make sure they don't get too close - not a purist's solution but perfectly functional. Thanks to @Robert at ID-Tasker for the final clue and the others for pitching in. InDesign is awesome and so is this community!
... View more
Mar 23, 2024
06:41 PM
Sure - I hid them the first time because I didn't want to constrict anyone with ideas of how to approach a solution.
... View more
Mar 23, 2024
06:14 PM
If I set the whole paragraph to right-aligned, how do I get the name at the start of the paragraph to be left-aligned? That's why I wrote in my OP that I wish there was a special tab that was the reverse of Right Align Tab so that I could force just the name left while the paragraph overall is right-aligned. Here's a screenshot of the goal, with much more realistic fake data and more variation: Everything in these examples can be accomplished with what I already know how to do except for right-justifying the wrapping of "1996 Society of Verbose People" - to create this simulation I added a manual line feed and right-justified that second line (using the same paragraph style as the phone number). Yes, very occasionally the name alone is long enough to wrap - I didn't realize that when I first asked the question above. But it's rare enough (likely less than a handful in the whole directory) that I wouldn't mind fixing those manually - my code could include an alert when it encounters a name long enough to possibly need adjustment in InDesign.
... View more
Mar 23, 2024
04:35 PM
Wow, thanks to all of you who were working on this while I slept! (I live in Japan, so my timezone is probably much different from most of you.) Yes, I should have included an example screenshot - I'll do that now. The first and second examples are how a short and long first line would look using a Right Indent Tab. (Thanks to @Robert at ID-Tasker for the ASCII code. Yes, I know I can use a normal tab with a right-justified tab stop at the column edge, but Right Indent Tab works even if the column width is changed later.) @rob day: No, I don't want to add line breaks manually (I assume that's what you mean by "forced line break") - the whole point of this is to avoid manual editing as much as possible, as there are over 1,000 entries in the directory and mistakes are easy to make. The third and fourths examples are using @Barb Binder's idea of a separate paragraph right-justified with baseline shift. At first I thought that was genious until I tried it - then I realized it has two issues, as you can see in the screenshot: (1) it doesn't wrap to avoid overlapping the name, and since the name length is also unpredictable, I can't just assign a left indent to the pstyle; (2) the next line has a gap above it. I guess #2 could be solved by baseline-shifting the Name downward instead of the Year/Org upward (since I want some space between entries anyway, although it would force the minimum space to be the height of a full text line), but how would I solve #1?
... View more
Mar 23, 2024
04:31 AM
1 Upvote
I'm importing content from a database to create a people directory in InDesign. The first line of each entry includes their name left-justified, and then a year and an organization abbreviation right-justified. InDesign's special Right Indent Tab character makes that happen nicely. But I have two questions: (1) What is the character code (hex value for ASCII or UTF-8) for the Right Indent Tab so I can insert it programmatically in the text being imported? (2) The column is somewhat narrow, so in some cases, the name and/or the organization is long enough that the end result wraps to a second line. That second line would contain the last part of the organization name, so I would want it right-justified. Is there a way to do that? If there was the opposite of a Right Indent Tab ("Left Justify Tab"?), I'd right-justify the paragraph and use that special character to force the name to the left, but I don't think there is such a thing. Ideas for solving this?
... View more
Mar 21, 2024
08:29 PM
Yes, you mentioned encoding, but the pulldown in your screenshot (and the resulting first line of exported files) only says "Unicode" vs. other things that are drastically different. UTF-8 is so normal everywhere as a synonym for Unicode that I almost forget there are other flavors: UTF-16 (and even UTF-32), Big Endian vs. Little Endian, and with BOM (not even needed for UTF-8). Anyway, I've now made a little function for outputting text with correctly converted line endings and encoding.
... View more
Mar 21, 2024
06:35 PM
1 Upvote
Wow, InDesign is picky! After exporting a sample from InDesign as you suggested, I trimmed down the definitions at the beginning to only what InDesign actually needed, which turned out to be just the first line "<UNICODE-WIN>" (I have Japanese in my content, so I can't just use ASCII): <UNICODE-WIN>
<pstyle:Org heading>AnOrgName
<pstyle:Org listing name>Person
<pstyle:Org heading>AnotherOrg
<pstyle:Org listing name>Person... But that wasn't enough for InDesign to accept a file generated by my code. Upon closer inspection, I first noticed that the line endings were different - I was just providing LF (simple style, standard in Unix-based OSs), but InDesign's exported file contained CRLF (Windows style, no surprise, since I'm using Windows). I tried changing the "WIN" in the first line to "UNIX", but that had no effect, so I changed my code to use CRLF everywhere. But that still wasn't enough! The last stubborn problem wasn't obvious until I compared the files with more powerful tools, which revealed that the character encoding was different - my database (and therefore the resulting text file by default) is UTF-8, but apparently InDesign won't consider a placed file as Tagged Text unless the encoding is UTF-16 LE with BOM. I had to do a lot of tricky things in my export code (written in PHP, in case anyone reading this is curious) to get it all to play together nicely, but I finally got there.
... View more
Mar 21, 2024
04:19 PM
CSV would be overkill, and it would be challenging to write additions to my export code to create all the right delimiters and escape everything that shouldn't be regarded as a delimiter (commas, quotes, line feeds, etc.). XML appears similar to the "tagged text" concept @Jeffrey_Smith suggested but more complex. If that's necessary, I'll try it, but I looked through the help page you linked and felt overwhelmed - in fact, I was already lost at the first sentence: "After you import XML data, the imported content appears as elements (the basic building blocks of XML) in the Structure pane." I've never seen a Structure pane (and don't see anything like that in the Window menu) and don't know how I would place a file so that it goes there.
... View more
Mar 21, 2024
03:28 PM
Yes, I have complete control over the pseudo tags - I'm the one writing the code that exports the data from the database. Searching the web for "InDesign Tagged Text Import", the newest relevant thing I found was a PDF for InDesign CS4 that was linked in an answer in this forum conversation, which claims the tag format was still the same as of 2018. So as a first test, I tried it with my simplest section, which uses two paragraph styles and no character styles. My text looks like this (names obfuscated for privacy): <ParaStyle:Org heading>A3.MP
<ParaStyle:Org listing name>ADAMS, Robert & Linda
<ParaStyle:Org listing name>BARTMAN, George & Barb
<ParaStyle:Org heading>AABFG
<ParaStyle:Org listing name>DAVIS, Bernard The PDF's instructions for importing the tagged text are the same as any other Place: Open the document into which you will place the tagged text, and choose File > Place. Locate and select the text-only tagged file. If desired, select Show Import Options. Click Open. But no processing of the tags happens. What step am I missing?
... View more
Mar 20, 2024
11:18 PM
1 Upvote
As long as the character style is only applied to that one letter, that's what you'll get. I'm importing text that I'm exporting from a database, and I'm using distinctive text indicators in that text that I will globally replace with styles in InDesign, so I'll just add another pair of indicators surrounding the first letter of every name (e.g. "##IN##S##OUT##mith"), which will get converted to a character style. The style doesn't have to look any different from the surrounding text - it just has to be there.
... View more
Mar 20, 2024
10:46 PM
Oh wow! I think I just found the answer. Instead of removing my question, I'll leave it here in case others need it. The answer is called "Text Variables", found on the Type menu. You can define a text variable of type "Running Header (Character Style)", select the style you want to pick up, choose "First on page" or "Last on page", and even include text before and/or after and even control punctuation and case. Once defined, then you put the cursor where you want it to show up (in my case, the header of a parent page) and select Type -> Text Variables -> Insert Variable, and choose the one you want. It works like a charm!
... View more
Mar 20, 2024
10:29 PM
6 Upvotes
For a people directory, I'm transitioning from using someone else's system to using my own database and InDesign. If possible I'd like to keep the appearance similar to how it was, and one aspect was that the top of each page displayed the first letter of the names on that page. See this example of the last page of O and first page of P from last year's directory: Is there a way I can populate that header letter automatically or semi-automatically? I know I can create 26 parent pages and manually apply each of those parent pages to the corresponding set of pages (and change those parent page assignments later if edits causes the flow to change). But it would be nice to make that more efficient and less error-prone. The letter I need will always be the first letter of the flowed content on the page, and if necessary, I can also delineate the first letter of all the names with a character style to help InDesign identify it. But I don't know how to get InDesign to either copy the contents of that first letter to a placeholder in the header or automatically apply a parent page based on it. I'm not afraid of scripting, although I'm new to scripting in InDesign.
... View more
Mar 20, 2024
07:36 PM
I have a process where I import a large amount of plain text exported from a database in multiple ways (alphabetically with all contact info, names grouped by city, names grouped by organization, etc.) for a directory. My export from the database includes distinctive bits I can find easily in InDesign with global find/change, so that I can replace them with paragraph styles and character styles. But doing all the find/change operations by hand is slow, so I'm wondering if there is a way to automate it at least a little. Small example snippet from my geographical listing (names changed for privacy): #KEN##GEOJ#秋田県#GEONJ# Akita-ken 1
#SHI##GEOJ#横手市#GEONJ# Yokote-shi
SMITH, Cindy
#KEN##GEOJ#青森県#GEONJ# Aomori-ken 20
#SHI##GEOJ#青森市#GEONJ# Aomori-shi
ADAMS, Stephen & Kimiko
JONES, Luke
MCDONALD, Paul & Sara #KEN# and #SHI# indicate a paragraph style to apply ("Geo prefecture" and "Geo city"), and #GEOJ# and #GEONJ# indicate the beginning and end of a character style ("Geo Japanese"). Yes, I can manually do the necessary operations (text searches for the paragraph style ones and a GREP search for the character style), and I did that for some parts of last year's directory. But the number of needed searches has increased this year, and it will be hard to remember from year to year how to do the searches (especially GREP). Is there a way to automate it? I don't mind scripting, although I'm new to scripting in InDesign.
... View more
Oct 18, 2023
02:06 AM
@OsakaWebbie I'm just now seeing this post, I downloaded the action! Thank you so much. However, I am running into the same issue as @Twisted_Mind . I run the action and then I get a notification that says "Could not complete the Black & White command because actions that reference files can only be played on the same platform on which they were recorded." Do you know any way around this? By @IanWhite55 Perhaps there is some way to edit the action to fix the file paths, but I have no idea. Probably the simplest solution would just be to record the action yourself. I haven't looked at this in years, but as far as I can remember, the Action I made is just the steps I described in this post (which I marked as the "correct answer", even though, of course, others helped with a lot of clues before I got to that point): https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/semi-automatic-healing-of-white-dust-spots/m-p/10573079#M258249
... View more
Sep 25, 2023
07:15 AM
1 Upvote
Sure, Eugene - I've just now put it back in Dropbox here. As it turns out, in 2019 I thought I was going to scan piles and piles of old photos, but after just getting started, I got too busy with other stuff and didn't get time to do many at all. You've reminded me that I should try to get back to that project!
... View more
Sep 20, 2023
04:54 PM
Did you try any of the things that worked for others? Karen5E2E (the post you directly replied to) simply clicked reload in the CC app. I logged out and back in (which probably does the same sort of reloading). And much earlier, someone found a suggestion by Bill Silbert helpful. It seems to be a syncing issue that can be resolved.
... View more
Jul 25, 2023
04:03 PM
Ah, yes, diving in the caves under the code! 😉 Sometimes I do that myself, but in this case I'm glad you and Uwe had the time for it, because I needed to turn my attention to designing the rest of the magazine. In theory, I should only need to design articles and just drop in the ads, but in reality, I often have to clean up ads in one way or another (though normally the issues are visible before I export).
... View more
Copyright © 2024 Adobe. All rights reserved.
AdChoices