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F
faseolli
Participant
December 16, 2020
Question

How to hyphenate numbers?

  • December 16, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 835 views

Hello,

how can I hyphenate numbers?

 

I have the following problem:
In my catalog are many tables with Article-Numbers, which consists of numbers and letters, f.e. ABC123XYZ. I need to hyphen this Article- Numbers in the corresponding column, so the content fits (and line-breaks if needed) and causes no overset errors. Unfortunately indesign doesnt hyphenate numbers, even when I add the Article-Number with hyphens to the user-dictionary through Edit>Spelling>UserDictionary...

 

Because of many entries, I need this to happen automatically and not manually by adding Type>InsertSpecialCharacter>HypensAndDashes>DiscretionaryHyphens.

 

How can I solve this?

Thanks...

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

S
SJRiegel
Legend
December 16, 2020

This is a job for GREP find/change - (edited for discretionary hypen instead of a dash)

This expression will work even if your number of letters and numbers is not always the same.

It finds a full "word" consisting of any number of upper case letters followed by any number of digits, and replaces it with the letters, a discretionary hyphen, then the numbers

 

    F
    faseolliAuthor
    Participant
    December 17, 2020

    Thanks, it works, but theres a small drawback, the search applies to the complete document. Is it possible to specify the search and apply only on tables in the document?

    S
    SJRiegel
    Legend
    December 17, 2020

    If the text in your tables has a different paragraph- or character style formatting (or different formatting), you could use that (in the Find Format box of the GREP dialog) to isolate the change to the tables.

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