Data Merge – Blank Lines & Space removal does not work ?

[Danny__]

Dear Community –

Using InDesign CC 2019 / Version 14.0.2 (latest) and consulting everyone I know and everything there is out there has not produced a solution to my question/problem.

Problem 1Empty Space is not eliminated on fields that should adjust to the left margin

Problem 2

Soft (Shift + Return) or Hard (Return) plus (Remove Blank Lines) does not what it is supposed to do,

Example Fields to be filled (and some remain empty)

<Name> <Familyname>

<Flield 1>

<Flield 2>

<Flield 3>

Lorem Ipsum dolor …………

and it ALWAYS look like this:

Problem 1 | Space	Space is not ignored
<Familyname> <Flield 1> Lorem Ipsum dolor …………

Problem 2 | Empty Fields	Header 2	Header 3
<Name> <Familyname> <Flield 1> <Flield 2> <Flield 3> Lorem Ipsum dolor …………

Content Placement

I really really don't get it … and i hope there is a simple solution to this …

Thank you very much!

Danny

[Laubender]

Hi Danny,

the special characters you are seeing in the result are of unicode value FEFF.

You could remove them with a TEXT Find/Change action using <FEFF> for find and nothing for change.

GREP Find/Change will not work for this.

Trailing white space could be removed with a GREP Find/Change action.

You could try ^\s+ as pattern.

More on the why and how in this rather lengthy old thread:

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

( Best read it all… )

Regards,

Uwe

[Colin Flashman]

For the first issue, have you considered using a GREP style to condense any spaces at the start of a line to 1% at .1pt in size?

The GREP code would be ^\p{Zs}+ and the style would just have a horizontal width of 1% and size of 0.1pt.

For the second issue, I think the content placement options should be rephrased to be more accurate. I believe that the "Remove Empty Lines for Blank Fields" should more accurately read "Remove the hard return if one field was placed in a line and there was nothing in it". It doesn't work with soft returns and assumes there's only going to be one field in that line. If you use hard returns instead of soft returns then the feature should work. Is there a reason that soft returns have been used in this instance? I'd imagine hard returns would work just as well.