The composite image below is almost self-explanatory. I am finalizing the design of a people directory that uses tagged text generated from a database to automatically assign paragraph styles when placed. To delineate a new letter of the alphabet, I use a paragraph style with extra spacing and a "rule above" as shown here. It works great when the new letter hits in the middle of a column (green circle), but if it hits at the top of a column (red circle), the rule is in the margin. I understand why that's happening ("space before" is ignored at the top of text frames, which is normally good), but is there something I can do in the paragraph style settings to force the content down so the rule is at the top of the frame instead of floating where it shouldn't be? Yes, I know I can manually lower the top of the frame after placing the text, and I'll do that if necessary. But it would be nice if it just worked, so that there are no overrides in the parent page's text frames that would need fixing after placing freshly updated tagged text, which would no doubt have such rules in different places.   It would probably look a little better if the rule was at the bottom of columns instead of the top when the letter change happens at a column break, but that would require significantly more cleverness in the code that creates the tagged text, because the code would need to look ahead and see what the next name is, not just remember the previous one. And even if I did that, I'd still have this layout problem in InDesign, because the "rule below" would be in the bottom margin.   ... View more

A couple months ago I worked out the kinks of using "tagged text" to get paragraph styles and character styles applied automatically to imported text. For background, see this thread. At the time, experimentation demonstrated that I didn't need to define the styles in the text file as long as the styles were already defined in the ID document. Everything was working fine.   But now I'm coming back to this project, and suddenly InDesign is complaining that it can't find the paragraph styles in a "paragraph table". Here is a MWE: <UNICODE-WIN> <pstyle:Alpha Line 1><cstyle:Alpha initial>E<cstyle:><cstyle:Alpha name>LLRICK, Karen<cstyle:> 1996 IND <pstyle:Alpha Rom address><cstyle:Member symbol>¬<cstyle:> <pstyle:Alpha right><cstyle:No break>エルリック<cstyle:>   And here is a screenshot of the error popup I'm getting:   If I add simple definitions to the file, like this (modeled after the definitions in the other thread's answer, which were not needed in my experience): <UNICODE-WIN> <DefineParaStyle:Alpha Line 1=<Nextstyle:Alpha Line 1>> <DefineParaStyle:Alpha Rom address=<Nextstyle:Alpha Rom address>> <DefineParaStyle:Alpha right=<Nextstyle:Alpha right>> <pstyle:Alpha Line 1><cstyle:Alpha initial>E<cstyle:><cstyle:Alpha name>LLRICK, Karen<cstyle:> 1996 IND <pstyle:Alpha Rom address><cstyle:Member symbol>¬<cstyle:> <pstyle:Alpha right><cstyle:No break>エルリック<cstyle:> Then it no longer complains about the styles, but it creates new paragraph styles with none of the formatting I want. I don't want to create new styles - everything is already nicely defined and organized in the document I'm importing into.   Curiously, it is not complaining about character styles and is correctly using the ones in the document. Only paragraph styles are having this problem. Any clues? My ID version is 19.0.1 x64, and I'm pretty sure it has not be upgraded during the couple months I wasn't looking at this. ... View more

I'm importing content from a database to create a people directory in InDesign. The first line of each entry includes their name left-justified, and then a year and an organization abbreviation right-justified. InDesign's special Right Indent Tab character makes that happen nicely. But I have two questions:   (1) What is the character code (hex value for ASCII or UTF-8) for the Right Indent Tab so I can insert it programmatically in the text being imported?   (2) The column is somewhat narrow, so in some cases, the name and/or the organization is long enough that the end result wraps to a second line. That second line would contain the last part of the organization name, so I would want it right-justified. Is there a way to do that? If there was the opposite of a Right Indent Tab ("Left Justify Tab"?), I'd right-justify the paragraph and use that special character to force the name to the left, but I don't think there is such a thing. Ideas for solving this? ... View more

For a people directory, I'm transitioning from using someone else's system to using my own database and InDesign. If possible I'd like to keep the appearance similar to how it was, and one aspect was that the top of each page displayed the first letter of the names on that page. See this example of the last page of O and first page of P from last year's directory: Is there a way I can populate that header letter automatically or semi-automatically? I know I can create 26 parent pages and manually apply each of those parent pages to the corresponding set of pages (and change those parent page assignments later if edits causes the flow to change). But it would be nice to make that more efficient and less error-prone. The letter I need will always be the first letter of the flowed content on the page, and if necessary, I can also delineate the first letter of all the names with a character style to help InDesign identify it. But I don't know how to get InDesign to either copy the contents of that first letter to a placeholder in the header or automatically apply a parent page based on it. I'm not afraid of scripting, although I'm new to scripting in InDesign. ... View more

I have a process where I import a large amount of plain text exported from a database in multiple ways (alphabetically with all contact info, names grouped by city, names grouped by organization, etc.) for a directory. My export from the database includes distinctive bits I can find easily in InDesign with global find/change, so that I can replace them with paragraph styles and character styles. But doing all the find/change operations by hand is slow, so I'm wondering if there is a way to automate it at least a little.   Small example snippet from my geographical listing (names changed for privacy):   #KEN##GEOJ#秋田県#GEONJ# Akita-ken 1 #SHI##GEOJ#横手市#GEONJ# Yokote-shi SMITH, Cindy #KEN##GEOJ#青森県#GEONJ# Aomori-ken 20 #SHI##GEOJ#青森市#GEONJ# Aomori-shi ADAMS, Stephen & Kimiko JONES, Luke MCDONALD, Paul & Sara   #KEN# and #SHI# indicate a paragraph style to apply ("Geo prefecture" and "Geo city"), and #GEOJ# and #GEONJ# indicate the beginning and end of a character style ("Geo Japanese").   Yes, I can manually do the necessary operations (text searches for the paragraph style ones and a GREP search for the character style), and I did that for some parts of last year's directory. But the number of needed searches has increased this year, and it will be hard to remember from year to year how to do the searches (especially GREP). Is there a way to automate it? I don't mind scripting, although I'm new to scripting in InDesign. ... View more