Organizing Text - "splitting" text boxes?

[linusr31378619]

Hey everyone,

I again wonder if theres an easy solution to a problem i havent been able to work out for a while in InDesign..

What I wished to be able to do in InDesign is splitting a Text box - or better to release a certain word or phrase into a new box..

So say youre making a flyer and you have all the dates, author names, topics, venues in a single text document, now you want to split them up and give each differnet fonts and weights and so on, I always end up copying each and every one seperatly and organizing them later..

Is there any way to break up a big text box with lots of information into small pieces quickly / efficiently?

What would also be amazing is a kind of a free text selection? say there are all the dates on the left of a line/paragraph and some venue descripition on the other side of the line, is there a way to select the dates and release them into their own textbox?

12.05        Superbowl

11.09        Theater

09.12        Christmas

or a way to at least select multiple text parts like you do with objects and the crtl+click?

might there be any scripts for this?

...

Seems like a common problem and a big time consumer.. How do you go about this ?

Thank you!

[jane-e · Accepted solution]

My solution would be to select the info and convert it to a table (with no borders, no horizontal or vertical strokes).

Then you could select a column or row easily and also adjust the space between the rows and columns.

Use the Table menu and Window > Text > Table panel. You can right-click and use the Control panel if you have at least a cell selected.

Pro tip: also use Cell styles and Table styles to speed things up

[Jeffrey_Smith]

Another method to expedite formatting is nested styles or grep styles. In the example you provided, either could work.

The nested style would format the numeral dates with a character style that is different than the paragraph style. The option to change just the date would be  "name of date character style"  "up to"  "1"  "Tab Character" in Nested Options

The GREP style could look for many various patterns, in your example   \d\d.\d\d  would find   "any 2 numbers" "."  "any 2 numbers" and format them with a character style similarly as above method.

[linusr31378619]

thanks very much!

[Obi-wan Kenobi]

Hi,

"Split" could be done with this script written by Justin Putney!

Ajar Productions » Split Text Extension for InDesign

(^/)

[BobLevine]

+1

Fabulous script.

[Obi-wan Kenobi]

Just for comment: Personal [not for free!] similar way (script written last night)!

Based on Grep!  Each text part is extracted in a new (no-anchored) text frame at the same place that the source text!

No UI!  The script creates an object style (auto-resizing) and a new layer as source text "back-up"!  Possible undo!

(^/) 

[jane-e]

When I watch cool stuff like this, I almost want to learn scripting, Obi-wan! I haven't done any programming since Fortran replaced Basic.

[jane-e]

Jeffrey's method is probably the most efficient — try it first!

[Kristof32869580n8l2]

as a idiot I just copy the file and then delete all the files inside copy and do this over and over again until all files are split let's say I have 3 pages then copy the file 3 times and delete all but one file