Character Styles

[mannyb49081980]

• HI Trying to create paragraph with color tabs and description. Like the one you see on Maps for Malls showing stores/ store numbers and names. Like the sample below.

Thanks,

[Steve Werner]

And the question is....?

[Laubender]

Hm. What's the specific question?

What did you try? Where did you fail or get stuck?

Regards,
Uwe

[mannyb49081980]

Thanks,

My question is how to create/add the color blocks to the paragraph?

Manuel Bocanegra

mbocanegra@rex3.com<mailto:mbocanegra@rex3.com>

DESIGN

954.452.8301 x290

[Laubender]

Hi,

is there a color code for the numbers in the first column?

Say, 800 to 900 must be in blue, K-1 is in yellow etc.pp.

Is there an Excel sheet with that information?

Regards,
Uwe

[mannyb49081980]

There is a color code. But not in order. NO excel

I have an old quarkxpress file with all stylesheets but thinking on recreate this in indesign for future use. We make changes every two months .

[Scott Falkner]

You could use Drop Caps and Nested Styles or GREP Styles to apply a highlight effect to the suite numbers.

Drop Caps and Nested Styles would apply a character style to text within a paragraph based on a simple pattern, like first thee characters in the paragraph or all characters up to the first tab. This would apply a basic highlight to the numbers but you would need to change the colour of the highlight manually, either by applying a different paragraph style (that uses a different character style for the highlight) or by apply the character style manual for most suites. Not ideal.

GREP is more versatile. It can apply a different character style based on the numbers. For example, it can apply a blue highlight to any numbers after the first tab and before the second tab. It can apply a different highlight to those numbers if the first digit is 2, and so on. It is complicated to set up, and you will probably still have to deal with exceptions unless you really want to get in on it. There is a Facebook group for GREP that could help you out.

But none of those will help you with 711 and 527. You can’t do that border with character styles, which means you can’t use GREP or Nested Styles for those. But you can use paragraph borders and paragraph shading. So for those lines make a separate paragraph style the applies a black border and change the offsets so it matches the highlighting in the other paragraphs.

This is all complicated, and unless you alone will be updating this document it is likely to confuse future users. But it is a way to automate at least some of the formatting and keep the colouring consistent.

Edit: The more I look at this to see how it is arranged the more I think GREP and Nested Styles are not going to help. The issue is some units have four digits. Highlighting (which is what GREP or Nested Styles will use) will produce different sized highlights for four digit units and three digit units. Paragraph Shading will always apply the shading in the same spot, and you can use those measurements for the white shading/black border.

So I would make a master paragraph style that uses blue shading (which seems the most common) then make new styles based on that style, each using a different shading colour. Apply whichever style is appropriate manually. Sure it’s not as automated, but it is easier to keep consistent and easier to explain to other users.

Edit 2: Paragraph shading will introduce its own issues, though. Paragraph shading uses the top of the paragraph for the top of the shading and the bottom of the paragraph for the bottom of the shading. Paragraphs that are two lines long will have two lines of shading, and I see that is going to happen. You'll need to make one-line styles that work on paragraphs that are one line long and two-line styles for paragraphs that are two lines long. You can also make a new paragraph style for the second line and make it a separate paragraph.

[mannyb49081980]

Thanks so much. I got it to work almost perfect. Still working on the black border (this is a little confusing but we’ll figure it out)

Manuel Bocanegra

mbocanegra@rex3.com<mailto:mbocanegra@rex3.com>

DESIGN

954.452.8301 x290

[MW Design]

One of the things I love to do in my spare time (for which I set aside a couple hours a day as it beats watching TV), is to try and solve such problems. So thank you for posting the issue, Manuel!

I don't have a current subscription, so I used something else. I didn't add tab leaders in my text styles on purpose.

My take on this is if I had this job to do every couple months—is there that much turn-over, or is it a low print-run, or?—and the budget was low, I would update a spreadsheet, copy the sheet, paste into a text editor and use Em Software's data merge. Once set up, it takes a minute to produce, maybe a couple minutes to handle bad frame flow, etc.

But if there was a decent budget, I would likely use a database for error checking upon entry/changes, and then export tagged text and, again using an Em Software product to import, just import the text into my template.

However, like mentioned above, how I would handle the output would partially depend on what is given me.

Mike

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi mannyb49081980 ,

if you update the lists every two months I'd suggest you do an Excel list to bring order to the data.

How to do this will depend on the features you can use with InDesign. And that will depend on the version of InDesign you are working with. What's your version of InDesign on what operating system? What's your version of Excel?

How will you get updated information from the customer?

Regards,
Uwe