Duplicating selected text (not complete paragraphs), with alerts for any subsequent edits

[puffmoike]

I want reproduce selected portions of text in a different part in the doc, and if the 'master' text is edited have the copies update automatically, or at least be alerted that the original text has changed.

Specific usage case: I am using it for a peculiar style of endnotes – rather than use numbered paragraphs the client wants to reproduce the relevant part of main text in endnotes and then provide the citation. Sometimes the quoted text will be an entire paragraph, but more typically it will only be a portion of a paragraph, and sometimes as little as a word. FWIW I this idea might be more broadly useful for pullquotes, where if the author edited the main text then the pull quote would be automatically updated, or at least there would be an alert that the relevant text had changed.

Suggested method seems to be to Create a hyperlink destination​ and then Insert a cross reference. My problem is that none of the Cross-Reference Formats seem to be useable. Partial Paragraph initially sounded the most promising, but it's very limited. The closest candidate is Text Anchor Name. (When creating a New Hyperlink Destination the selected text becomes the default name for that text anchor. Problem is the name field is limited to 100 characters, and often my selected text will exceed this).

Any ideas? Any scripting or plug-in options if it's not possible with regular tools?

[amaarora]

Hi,

You can easily achieve this by linking text frames and not parts of text.

Try using Place and Link feature of InDesign (Edit->Place and Link)?Use linked content features in InDesign . This would work for the pull-quotes use case

FYI: If you are on version CC 2018 and using Endnotes feature of InDesign then Place and Link of Endnote frame would only Link the text and to and fro navigation from endnote marker to its text wont work with the "Linked" or the child frame. The style and text content would be linked.

-Aman

[puffmoike]

Hi amaarora,

Thanks for the idea, but it doesn't address my scenario. As best I can tell from a quick read and play Place and Link is only useful for duplicating the content of entire frames.

What I need is a way to duplicate text strings which are part of a much larger story.

This is true both for my actual endnotes problem, and for my hypothetical pullquote scenario (which I included because I thought that might be an easier way for members to immediately understand what I was hoping to achieve).

[smoothsea]

Hi,

Is this something that you could do with text variables?

Regards,

Malcolm

[puffmoike]

smoothsea  wrote

Is this something that you could do with text variables?

Hi Malcolm,

That sounded like a promising idea, but just reading through the relevant help page I came across this warning, which is a deal breaker for my purposes:

Note:

Text variables do not break across lines.

But thanks for the idea