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LinaD36
Participating Frequently
November 22, 2013
Question

Multiple record data merge into paragraph styles-applies the wrong style

  • November 22, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 45630 views

Hi, I've been working on this project for sometime and everytime I manage to get one part of the workflow to work another seems to break. My agency publishes catalogs in multiple formats: large-print, audio, braille, and HTML. I've been trying to redesing our work process so that the catalogs will be laid out from merged data out of comma-separated file. The data merges have worked fairly well in Word, but InDesign is a challenge. I'm merging multiple records on a page, like a mailing label. The paragraphs need to be formatted and I'm trying to apply a paragraph style to them. After much work, I think I've finally got the data merge to work correctly, but the wrong paragraph styles are applied. I'm going to apply a new master page to the data once the data is merge that uses the paragraph styles for text variable running headers and I need to build a table of contents based on the paragraph styles so I need this to work. Attached are some screenshots.

Master page set up for data merge with paragraph styles:

Here is the merged document with the wrong paragraph styles applied:

I have only a few weeks to get this process ironed out to keep to our rigorous production schedule. If anyone can help I would really appreciate it.

thanks,

Lina

    1 reply

    Peter Spier
    Community Expert
    Peter SpierCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 22, 2013

    Can't really tell from those screen shots what styles are applied to the placeholders....

    L
    LinaD36Author
    Participating Frequently
    November 22, 2013

    Peter- All the styles on the screen have been applied.  The data has been merged onto 7 lines and each line has it's own paragraph style. But I think the problem is that some of the fields are empty and don't have data in them. The fields merged are below next to the paragraph style that they are supposed to be merged into:

    <<GENRE>> (Genre)

    <<SUBJECT_CODE>> (Subject Code)

    <<TITLE_ARTICLE>><<TITLE>>(Title)

    <<BN>> <<HRS>> hours<<MINS>> minutes (Time)

    <<ROLE>> <<AFN>> <<ALN>> <<CONJ>> <<CFN>> <<CLN>> (author)

    read by <<NFN>> <<NLN>> (narrator)

    <<ANNOTATION>> (annotation)

    The problem seems to occur because the Genre and Subject Code fields don't always have data in them and then somehow the Genre style is applied to the Title paragraph.

    -Lina

    L
    Community Expert
    LaubenderCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 5, 2013

    I'm curious why you want the empty paragraph? We normally preach aginst using empty paragraphs instead of adding space before/after to one of the styles. In fact, that's the way my directory merge is set up. The name style that starts each listing has space before included, and the business description that ends each listing has a return at the end (I normally don't have a return as the last character in a story), so as I manually thread frames from back to front it's just two clicks and the spacing is built in.


    The point is:

    I would not recommend to take "Adding Space Before/After" in the case of Lina's data to separate each unit from the other. In Lina's case it could be any of her paragraphs styles, that a new unit will begin with.

    Provided: the last section of each text frame is ALWAYS EXACTLY one paragraph long AND ALWAYS styled with the same paragraph style.

    So I decided that best flexibility will provided with an empty paragraph. You can style this one as you like. Or eliminate it with a quick TEXT search/replace action…

    Uwe

    Message was edited by: Laubender

    Message was edited by: Laubender

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