Place 3 paragraph styles side by side

[DarrenFMc]

Hi,

I have imported a lot of text using the XML import and it came in fine.

Each of the Child Nodes contains 10 text items. Each of the text items has been assigned a Paragraph Style.

I created a Paragraph Style for each of the elements and then assigned a Tag to the Paragraph Styles to format each of the leements in each XML child node.

At the moment they are all aligned under each other.

I would like 3 of the Paragraph style element to be side by side:

Example at the moment they show on the page as:

Paragraph Style 1

Paragraph Style 2

Paragraph Style 3

I would them to show as:

Paragraph Style 1 - Paragraph Style 2 - Paragraph Style 3

With 3000 Child Nodes I would like to be able to set the formatting using Paragraph styles if possible so that the changes will cascade through the document.

Is this possible?

Cheers

[Barb Binder]

Hi Darren:

Can we assume that paragraphs 1–3 are multi-line paragraphs? In that case you'd need to use tables or threaded frames with column breaks to get the paragraphs to sit side-by-side. InDesign doesn't have an easy way to set one multi-line paragraph next to another paragraph multi-line paragraph. If they are single-line, you can use tabs to space them across the page.

The good news is that you can use Next Paragraph to assign the cascading styles (paras 1, 2, and 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3) with a right-click in the Style panel.

~Barb

[DarrenFMc]

Hi

thanks for the quick response.

The 3 paragraph Style Elements are actually only 1-3 words in length

[Barb Binder]

Hi Darren:

In that case, you can use tabs to sit them side by side fairly easily, but they will all use the same paragraph style. Do they need 3 paragraph styles? Sharing what you have now and your intended layout would be helpful here.

~Barb

[DarrenFMc]

I actually tried a different approach which also did not work as expected.

I imported the XML file and tagged the Paragraph styles.

Then I deleted every Child Node except the first one.

I then opened up the Story Editor and formatted the Tags by removing some paragraph tags and adding a tab space between the 3 elements required.

So in the Story Editor it looked correct and updated on the Page for the one Node.

I then re imported the XML file hoping it would cascade and clone the same formatting but it removed it and imported everything with the basic structure.

If there was a way to tell Indesign to use the Story Editor structure, it would have worked.

[Barb Binder]

We can automate this after you import:

I then opened up the Story Editor and formatted the Tags by removing some paragraph tags and adding a tab space between the 3 elements required.

Does that help?

~Barb

[DarrenFMc]

Hi,

thanks for the feedback.

How do you automate this please?

[Barb Binder]

Based on my understanding of your description, your text comes in like this:

And you want it to look something like this:

If I got that right, set up a GREP query as follows:

Change All:

Results:

Set your tab stops.

Once it is working, you can save it to run anytime. And if you need the columns to look different, you can do that with nested styles.

~Barb