Showing category symbols in table

[CraigAitken10-1]

Hi there,

I'm about to start work on a product brochure and was wanting to find a way to add symbols to the end of a row which feature a range of symbols highlighting if the product is Frozen, Chilled, Gluten Free, Vegan etc etc.

My plan is to paste each section into the document individually e.g. within the 'meats' section we'll have a table for beef, a table for pork etc.

Would it be possible to do this with a 'find and replace' confined to the individual columns, or is there a way to paste the information in along with the text data?

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks,

[Geоrge]

If I will do something equal to your task than I will use it table for this. There is no problems with placing images to cell.

Or if you are perfectionist than you can find a way to do some font with your icons

[Laubender]

Hi craiga79458512 ,

hm…

One could assign the right symbol to the right text with a special font where e.g numbers in the original text are associated with symbols. That would be done with a GREP Style if you did a table with only one column.

You can create a font like that with InDesign using IndyFont, a script by Jongware and Marc Autret:

Indiscripts :: IndyFont

What perhaps speaks against this is the white fill in the symbols.

To correct that we would need another glyph in front of the symbol, a circle that will be filled with [Paper] and the symbol has to be kerned with negative values so that white circle and symbol are stacked exactly one over each other. And that would require a character in front of every symbol character in the text data.

Alternatively work with placed PDFs. One for every symbol.

The text that is represented as a symbol, maybe different numbers, would be formatted with a GREP Style perhaps that uses a character style done only for the symbols. Several Find/Replace actions would look for the applied character style and e.g. a specific number and the contents of the clipboard, your placed PDF would be copied first, would replace the found character.

Regards,
Uwe

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

Laubender  wrote

...

You can create a font like that with InDesign using IndyFont, a script by Jongware and Marc Autret:

Indiscripts :: IndyFont

What perhaps speaks against this is the white fill in the symbols.

To correct that we would need another glyph in front of the symbol, a circle that will be filled with [Paper] and the symbol has to be kerned with negative values so that white circle and symbol are stacked exactly one over each other. And that would require a character in front of every symbol character in the text data.

Thanks for mentioning IF! I saw the white backgrounds and thought "oh well, seems more suited to a custom SVG font then" – but yes! a single white-only circle would work as well! You can create a (black) circle of the correct size, and then drag the guideline for its width all the way to the left. That will create a non-spacing glyph: typing it in will not move the cursor, and the next character will land on top of it.

Hold on, I'll give that a try with IF.

[Jongware]

Works like a charm... These are the two characters I made:

[Laubender]

I did an extra "Like" for the contents of your first column  🙂

Thanks,
Uwe

[CraigAitken10-1]

Thanks so much for your help - I'm looking into this from next week so I'm sure this will come in really handy!

[Srishti Bali]

Hi Craig,

I would like to know if the steps suggested above worked for you, or the issue still persists.

Kindly update the discussion if you need further assistance with it.

Thanks,

Srishti

[CraigAitken10-1]

Hi there,

I've been unable to test this as having trouble when downloading indyfont and have passed to a design team. Many thanks for everyone's responses though, I'll be sure to try those steps in future should I need a similar outcome myself.

Thanks,

Craig.

[CraigAitken10-1]

Apologies for the late response - I'll look into this further - thank you so much for helping!