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First line indent after soft return - any solution?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 27, 2020
3 respuestas
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I have this 300-page text to lay out, and soft returns are used extensively in the text as a second type of paragraph break. I would like to know if there is a way to automate a first line indent after every soft return. Is there?

I know now that Indesign doesn't consider a soft return a paragraph break, and I haven't been able to find a workaround that doesn't involve either (a) indenting manually, or (b) separating the paragraphs manually. As far as I understand the proper way to do it would have been to have only hard returns in the source text, and then to use two different paragraph styles in Indesign.

Any suggestions on how to best solve this, given the situation?

Este tema ha sido cerrado para respuestas.

Mejor respuesta de Barb Binder

Hi Hyx:

You will need to define two styles. After you remove the line breaks, assign style 1 to all of the body, and then comb through and assign style 2 to the paragraphs that were after the line breaks. You can define a keyboard shortcut for style 2 to speed things up, and while this might seem interminable, it won't take more than an hour or two for 300 pages.

Without someone writing a script to automate the process, this is the reality, unless the paragraphs follow a specific pattern of style 1, style 2, style 1, style 2 for the entire document (no deviations). If they do, let us know and we can give you a faster option using Next Style

~Barb

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Although I think it is best done with two styles as Barb suggested, you could add a tab stop to the body paragraph style. When you enter a line break, follow it up with a tab.

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

R

rubenlourens

Participating Frequently

Yes this is sort of the only thing I can do. Starting it with a tab. It is ugly but it can be used by the writer. It is just that if I update the file the work after is less as possible.

thanks

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Hi, @rubenlourens — this is at least the second thread in which you are seeking answers for your problem. The other thread went into great detail about how to use two styles to get exactly the result you describe, but I get the feeling you are misunderstanding much about styles and how to apply them to your (or this third-party writer's) composition.

Put simply, there is only one right way to do this — have a non-indented paragraph combined with indented paragraphs — and the prior dicussion took this two-style method, as Barb also mentions in the older discussion above, in step-by-step detail.

If the writer persists in using faulty technques, such as a soft return/line break followed by spacing or a tab, it's up to you as the layout designer to convert this flow to the proper, two-style layout. Use search and replace to find [linebreak][tab] and replace it with a paragraph end, applying the indented style to the new paragraph.

Any other process or workaround or preserving line breaks within a single paragraph and style is simply poor layout, and limits the quality of what you will be able to achieve in this project (or any other).

Put another way, it doesn't matter what techniques or process the writer is using in Word. They're faulty there, too, and there is absolutely no reason to preserve this broken method in laying the material out in InDesign.

Barb Binder

Respuesta

Community Expert

Hi Hyx:

You will need to define two styles. After you remove the line breaks, assign style 1 to all of the body, and then comb through and assign style 2 to the paragraphs that were after the line breaks. You can define a keyboard shortcut for style 2 to speed things up, and while this might seem interminable, it won't take more than an hour or two for 300 pages.

Without someone writing a script to automate the process, this is the reality, unless the paragraphs follow a specific pattern of style 1, style 2, style 1, style 2 for the entire document (no deviations). If they do, let us know and we can give you a faster option using Next Style

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

vladan saveljic

Inspiring

For example, it could be done in 2 steps in this way (try in a copy of your file first)

First step:

Grep

Find:

\n

Change

\r££

(££ is a combination of the two symbols that are probably not present in your file. You can choose other symbol or combination)

Second step:

Find

(^££)(.+$)

Change

$2

format: your paragraph style with indent

H

hyxAutor

Participant

vladan - thanks for your suggestion, I will definitely give that a go. 😃

Barb Binder

Community Expert

No, you can't define a first line indent after a soft return/line break—it only works for hard returns.

You can quickly remove the line breaks and change them to hard returns:

Edit > Find/Change > Text
Find: ^n
Change: ^p

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

H

hyxAutor

Participant

Thanks for confirming that, Barb. And would there be a way of some sort to isolate the original hard returns so I could differentiate between the two after performing the Find-Change?

H

hyxAutor

Participant

because otherwise, as far as I understand, as soon as I change the soft breaks to hard ones, all the paragraphs will look exactly the same, and I can't do that for this document.

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