Never break line at specific character?

[Mario_1UP]

I'm working on a sports event banner with about 34.000+ names on it. Each full name is separated with a bullet (•) and the banners is about 14 meter wide. At the end of my text frame some first and last names get separated and since the banner is this large this is unwanted.

The format of the names is pretty simple: • First Last • First Last • First Last • etc

My workaround now is to manually adjust this... but as you can images this takes a lot of time since everything changes when making adjustments to such a large text and leaves a lot of room for error.

Question: is it possible to tell InDesign to never break the line between bullets so that the first and last names always stay together? And, tell InDesign to never start or end a line with a bullet?

Thanks!

[manal shanableh]

can you please share a screenshot to understand exactly what is the problem?

[Mario_1UP]

I cannot share the actual names becouse of privacy.. See attached screenshot as an example.

[Mario_1UP]

* because

[jmlevy]

Maybe it is because English is not my mother tongue but I cannot understand how you can keep the first and last name on the same line AND in the same time avoid a line to start and end with a bullet… 

[Mario_1UP]

This is something I do manually. But since this kind of jobs are becoming more regular I thought about finding a way to make things easier. So maybe the conclusion to my quest is that this is simply not (yet) possible. 😉

[jmlevy]

You wrote that you do not want a line beginning or ending with a bullet. On your exemple, there is a bullet at the end of the second line; if you don't want it at the end of the line, it will jump at the beginning of the third…

If you want to be sure to keep the first name and the last name on the same line, use a nonbreaking space between the first name and the last name. You can run afind change like this:

[Mario_1UP]

Thanks jmlevy! This works almost perfectly for the breakage of the names. Only a few manual edits needed. This is a very welcome time saver 🙂

[Randy Hagan]

jmlevy's answer is truly an elegant solution to a vexing little problem. It's simple, entirely within the operator's control and highly effective.

It's stuff like this that keeps me coming back here. I learn a lot here.

Thank you,

Randy

[Randy Hagan]

Alas, I'm afraid that this is (mostly) the case.

As InDesign looks to break lines, it searches within a hyphenation zone, defined by default in English measure as 0.5 in for the US version of InDesign. That's the equivalent to 12.7mm, but I don't know exactly the equivalent setting for other countries' versions of InDesign.

When text will break following any given line within that zone, InDesign looks to hyphenate a word or find a space to use for that line break. It has no ability to define or designate the difference between the space after a first name or a last name, so I'm afraid that will remain something needing manual intervention.

I wish I had a better answer for you,

Randy

[Peter Spier]

For work like this I typically turn off hyphenation (in combination with theuse of the non-breaking space between parts of an individual name) so names never break.

Finding the bullets at the beginning or end of a line is not something easy to automate, however, so I would just delete thoise manually.

[Willi Adelberger]

1. Create a character style with no break.

Create in the Paragraph style a GREP style (with the Character style) where any letter in combination with a space and the bullet is affected. But somewhere you have to break.

[Mario_1UP]

Thanks all for the quick answers and tips! I'll give the suggested solutions a try tonight. Will report back 🙂