set a special character designer

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
March 1, 2026
2 replies
373 views

Hello,

I would like to create a character designer adding automatically “underline + quotation mark” to a selected text. How to do it ?

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

If the terms (e.g. “apple”) are being defined or first used at some point in the document, further instances could be Xrefs to the defining instance, and it’s easy to apply the quotes and underline as part of the Cross-Reference Format.

This also has the possibly [un]desired benefit of each referring use being a hypertext to the defining instance.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

The underline part is easy, but character styles cannot add characters. If you are referring to a trailing or surrounding quotation marks, you should be able to create a unique character style that added the underline, then do a grep find/change at the very end of your formatting to add in the quotation marks.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

P

pierret18811376Author

Inspiring

Hi Dave,

I understand how to set the character designer to obtain an underline, but I don’t know how to set the Find/Change window. My goal is to obtain this :

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Oh, I see what you mean--I misspoke. FrameMaker can’t search for a character style and add characters.

Is there anything in the text that can indicate a unique pattern, such being preceded by a comma and followed by a period?

OR did the text come from a spreadsheet or other data source?

OR do you have access to InDesign? (It can do what you need. Perhaps you can use the 7-day trial--just be SURE to cancel in time.)

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

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