Indesign Data Merge: Blank Line

Question

I am trying to create a document that looks like the below. It needs to have a bold header name followed by a description. However not every document will have all of the fields. I have set up my data merge file but am still seeing blank lines when I export it. The "Remove Blank Lines for Empty Fields" is checked. Can this be fixed?

Document how I want it to look:

Set up the data merge tags:

CSV file with my headers/descriptions. Blank spaces where I dont want text. LEDA and LED should not be included.

Merged product. There should not be any spaces in between "Lens" and "Fasteners".

Laubender · Answer

Hm. You could tackle the issue two-fold.

[1] Use a special, a unique sequence of characters as fill-in for your empty cells in your data source.

After merging the data remove the whole paragraph where that sequence occurs with GREP Find/Change.

[2] Leave your source as is. Do your merge like before. Search for all paragraphs with Unicode FEFF special characters and then remove that paragraphs. The TEXT pattern for that Unicode special character is <FEFF>. As you can see with two paragraphs above "LABEL:" it could be that more than one special character remains in a paragraph.

Hm. And I strongly urge you to change your data merge template document:

That is really important! Remove all empty paragraphs in the template. Control the distance from paragraph to paragraph with Space Before and Space After values.

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