Applying character styles over character styles

February 22, 2021 Leave a comment

There may be occasions where more than one character style has to be applied to the same words, such as a highlight, italic, etc. I recently saw this request over at the InDesign requests page.

In the request, the requestor does hint at a way that this can already be achieved in InDesign, though it can be time consuming. Let’s start from the beginning and look at some text that has an italic character style applied to it.

But if I apply a separate highlight character style that I’ve also made…

The highlight appears but the italic is removed. Reapplying the italic character style to the word only changes the word back to italic and doesn’t preserve the underline.

One solution is to do a local override – that is to manually apply the appearance but without using a character style

Note the plus that appears to the right of the Paragraph Style 1 – this indicates a local override is present.

That works, but let’s say that the client asks for all italics to now be a tint of the colour initially used. That’s fine if character styles were applied as the italic style needs to be changed once in the properties of the character style. However, all the italics applied using local overrides will need to have their fills reapplied with the new settings.

Yes, the eyedropper tool and find/change can assist, but if character styles were applied, these additional steps would not be necessary.

In this circumstance, making a third style that has both the underline and italic would make sense.

In this case, it adds one more character style – not a big deal, but in a large document, the quantity of character styles can grow fast.

GREP Styles to the rescue

Take this chemical equation in a science textbook. It currently looks like this:

The subscripts in this equation have been applied with a character style that I’ve named sub. However, the author wants the reaction only in bold. If the equation is highlighted and then has a bold character style applied, this happens:

All of the subscript formatting of the numbers are lost.

I can then create a second style called “bold sub” that has bold and subscript properties and base the style on the bold formatting, but I then have to make sure I correctly apply the newly created style to the appropriate numbers… this now introduces a level of human error.

But what if I could apply the bold style and keep the subscripts? It is possible using GREP styles. Using the GREP code from this CreativePro post (look for Laurent Tournier’s post dated Oct 9 2010 in the comments) apply it to the paragraph style.

[editor’s note – I’ve adjusted mine to account for the naming of elements 113-118 as of 2018, so if you want that amended code, contact me via my contact page]

Now apply the paragraph style to the recently bolded text.

Brilliant! Note how the I-beam cursor is between two subscript numbers, yet the character style shows that this is bold only.

This technique can also be applied to other formatting where subscripts or superscripts need to be preserved, such as:

  • Ordinal Numbers
  • Numbers written with scientific notation
  • Squared or cubed measurements

It just requires the right GREP syntax. All of the above examples used GREP styles to format the subscripts and superscripts only. To learn this technique and others, apply to join the Treasures of GREP Facebook page.

Once again to illustrate the point, the author wants these six lines in bold. By highlighting the lines and applying the bold character style, the subscripts and superscripts stay in tact.

Nested styles

Similarly, this can also be achieved with Nested styles. Take the last two lines in the last example prior to applying the bold – if I want the ordinal number at the start of the line to be bold, I don’t have to write a GREP style but I can use a nested style such as the one below.

That will give me this result without applying any manual character styles to the text:

There are catches to this technique

The first catch is that the character styles must have the minimal amount of style changes only. That is the sub character style only changes the position of the character to subscript, so that is the only item that style will apply, while maintaining the rest of the paragraph style’s formatting.

The second catch is to be aware of the style hierarchy. The following list is in order of what style overrules another (from most to least dominant):

  • Local override
  • Local character style
  • Nested style
  • GREP style lowest in list in the paragraph style settings
  • GREP style highest in list in the paragraph style settings

There can be several advantages to layering character styles by using GREP styles:

  • Less character styles.
  • Time saving for commonly formatted items such as ordinal numbers.
  • Consistency based on GREP patterns for words.

Similarly, there can be drawbacks with this technique:

  • Looks for particular words or phrases, so not appropriate for instances where dozens of words or phrases may make more GREP styles than are manageable.
  • Applies to paragraph styles, if used over many paragraph styles, the GREP style needs to be applied repeatedly. Scripts can help with this, such as one I wrote on my scripts page, or GREP Editor from Peter Kahrel.
  • Can’t take a bold style and italic style and combine them – it can only apply additional attributes that weren’t there previously.
  • GREP styles (along with live preflight, page thumbnails, dynamic spellcheck and any other service that has to run while the document is being composed) can slow the processing speed of the machine, particularly on larger documents.

Filed under Fonts & Type, GREP, Page Layout Tagged with , , , , , ,

GREPgraphing – Beyond 2000

November 22, 2019 Leave a comment

In 2016, I developed a concept of creating bar graphs using GREP styles. Put simply, when a number was typed such as 1423, several different GREP styles would kick in to transform the number into a bar graph. In the above example:

  • if there’s a one for the 1 followed by three digits, make the one character 1000% wide;
  • If there’s a 4 followed by two digits, make the four character 400% wide;
  • If there’s a 2 followed by one digit, make the two character 20% wide;
  • If there’s a 3 as the last character, make the three 3% wide.

To successfully work with any whole number between 1-1999, this technique requires creating 29 different types of GREP styles and character styles. It uses a fixed width font and takes advantage of GREP styles to adjust the width of the numbers to represent them as their appropriate value as a bar graph. I’ve written about this technique in more detail over at InDesignSecrets.

In 2018, I expanded upon this idea and made a script so that anyone wishing to use the technique without typing the 29 character and GREP styles could simply run a script:

Beyond 2000

One catch with this technique is that it stops at 1999 as the character style to represent 2000 can’t be made by creating a 2000% width as the maximum character width is 1000%. However, there is a workaround – create a new character style called 2000, based on the 1000 style, but give it a tracking of 600.

Adjust the GREP graph paragraph style and underneath the 1000% GREPstyle, make a new one using the new 2000% character style that was made and give it the following pattern:

2(?=\d\d\d\b)

To test this, I have two different GREPgraph styles containing the 1000 figure and have put them side by side. In the text frame underneath, if I type 2000 into the text frame with the GREPgraph beyond 2000 style applied to it, it should be the same width, right?

Absolutely. If I make an additional 3000% character style based on the 2000% style but changed its tracking to 1200, and added a GREPstyle to the paragraph style to apply the 3000% character style to the pattern 3(?=\d\d\d\b), this will work too.

From here, a pattern can now be seen: to get to the next 1000 in width, add another 600 to the tracking of that thousand’s character style and add a new GREP style pattern to the GREPgraph style. This will work until the tracking hits its maximum of 10,000.

Doing all this in less GREP steps

As stated earlier, the original technique required 29 GREP styles to create a GREPgraph, but what if I said it was possible to achieve the numbers 1-1999 (actually a few more – 2047) using 12 GREP styles? This can be done too, but requires a technique in Excel, and that is to convert the original base-10 number into a 16-bit binary number. I’d actually described this technique back in 2011, but it was implemented differently and with more complications: this method is far simpler.

First, convert the desired base-10 number to a 16-bit binary number in Excel using the following formula:

=DEC2BIN(A1/256,8)&DEC2BIN(MOD(A1,256),8)

Now that the number is displayed in binary, copy the binary number into InDesign.

The technique basically works the same way as the original GREPgraph technique but has a slightly different implementation. First, the character styles need to be created that will change the widths, but instead of making 1-9, 10-90, 100-900 and 1000, only the character styles 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024 need to be created. For example, the character style 32 will only contain the width of 32%, and this pattern will apply to the other numbers mentioned.

Zero and 1024 are the exceptions. Zero will have a character style featuring a .1pt size, no fill or stroke, and 1% width. 1024 will have a character style of 1000% and a tracking of 14.

This will create a total of 12 character styles.

Now to make the paragraph style. To keep it simple, the appearance of the bar graph will controlled by the paragraph rule (though more advanced methods can be made using combinations of rule above, below, underlines and strikethroughs).

Here is where the magic happens – the GREP styles. Here are the styles and how they are implemented in the GREP style panel of the Paragraph style.

And here is the result:

So what’s happening here?

It’s important to understand how binary numbers are written compared to base-10 numbers. The following site gives a really good explanation, and that’s all that’s happening here – the GREP styles are being applied to the 1s in the binary number, based on their position in the binary number, and applying the appropriate GREP widths.

It can go larger

Just like the regular GREP graph, this too can be expanded to numbers larger than 2000 by creating an additional character style that has an added tracking applied. In this case, to represent the numbers 1-4095, a further character style can be added: 2048.

An advantage of this technique is that instead of creating an additional 9 character/GREP styles for each power of 10 using the base-10 GREP styles, the binary method will require a new style every time the total doubles e.g. 14th GREP style would be 4096, 15th GREP style would be 8192…

The obvious disadvantage with this technique: the numbers to be displayed as bar graphs have to be written out in binary first.

Is this something I would use? Probably not myself, as GREPgraphs are normally enough for my purposes, but I often hear the question “what if you need more than 1999 in a graph” so I felt that it was worth answering the question: It can be done, but it’s a lot of effort to get there.

Filed under Fonts & Type, GREP, Page Layout Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Please fix Text Variables so they behave like regular text

November 17, 2019 Leave a comment

Within the type menu of Adobe InDesign is the Text Variables feature. This allows users to insert a special character that will display one of the following items:

  • A chapter number
  • A file-related date such as the creation date, modification date or output date
  • Filename
  • Image Name (aka captions setup)
  • Last Page Number
  • Running Header based on either a used paragraph or character style
  • Custom static text

Unfortunately, there is an unwanted behaviour of the text variables – InDesign treats them as a single character rather than the actual content within the variable. This has a few unwanted consequences:

  • Long variables that would normally break over several lines are squished into one line;
  • They cannot be formatted using GREP or Nested styles, nor can specific words be manually selected for formatting.

It’s an issue that is “in backlog” by the Adobe InDesign team to address, but that was first stated in 2017.

If the issue was resolved, it would have enabled my GREPGraph solution to be applied in the following InDesignSecrets article.

As it turns out, it is also affecting another solution that would make lives easier for anyone who has to create diaries and planners on a regular basis.

The brief:

A planner is created by making a base template and then creating threaded text for the dates that are represented only by numbers. This makes populating a diary from week to week relatively easy…

…until the other material has to be populated, such as what month it is, what term it is, and what week it is. This is best illustrated in the first two minutes of a Youtube video by Rob Cubbon.

Incidentally in Rob’s video, he uses frame breaks between each record, but that isn’t required. Instead, adjust the paragraph style of the numbers by going to the Keep Options and from the Start Paragraph dropdown, select In Next Frame.

The technique:

Instead of populating the text frames simply with numbers, what if the frames were populated with more information that can be called upon by running header text variables, such as the month?

I can make a list in excel that contains the day of the week and the month in one column. This is also done without a space intentionally for reasons that will become evident soon.

I can then copy this text to my InDesign file. However, note that the text overflows and isn’t correct – that is because the flowing numbers need to have a character style that will hide the text that we want to be visible elsewhere. To do this, I’ve created a character style called hidden, and its properties are:

  • .1 point high;
  • 1% wide;
  • No fill or stroke.

That’s fine, but applying that manually to everything but the numbers will be a nuisance, so the paragraph style for the numbers has to be modified using Nested Styles.

The nested style will apply a style of [None] to the digits as they need to be visible, but will intentionally hide the month.

So why I am I intentionally hiding the month? Because I’m only interested in the information it represents, and this can be called upon by a text variable. I will go to the master page and insert a text variable for a running header showing me the first result of hidden on the page.

The issue with the technique

That’s fine until I get to a spread that contains two months. I’d rather both months be present rather than the earlier month. For example, I’d like the headline to read April/May instead of April. I can do this by returning to my master page, apply my blinking text cursor to the text variable that is already there, type a slash and then create a new text variable that is a running header looking for hidden character style in the last instance.

Once I’ve inserted the variable and returned to that spread, that now looks fine, but all others are now affected.

I should be able to make a GREP style that will look for a word, then a backslash, and the same word it initially found. I’ll create a new text frame with some sample text to see if it works. The GREP code I’ll use is this:

Apply style: Hidden

GREP: (.+?)\K\/\1

Looks like its working in my demo, but as I check the document it isn’t… I’ll find a spread where I know the months split.

But that should work. I saw it work on plain text, why isn’t it working on text variables? That’s because GREP styles and Nested Styles don’t work on text variables. If I want this technique to work, I’ll have to use a workaround.

The workarounds:

  • Use a script to convert the text variables to plain text. Marijan Tompa used to have such a product via the Adobe Exchange, but it has since been removed, and it is not mine to give away. Other scripts do exist on the Adobe InDesign forums, but they are not as flexible as Marijan’s original script. It also works only one way, and can’t convert the text back to variables.
  • Don’t attempt to use the GREP style to hide the duplicate month, but instead only add a Running Header for the first instance on a page and add the others manually by overriding the affected master pages;
  • Create the desired date in Excel using a formula.

The issue with the first two solutions is that it prevents the solution from remaining live. The last solution will work but requires in-depth knowledge of Excel and – for many diaries – requires having an Excel file on stand-by for this purpose.

Ultimately, I’d love to see a fix for this issue as it would open up many possibilities. If you feel that this needs attention now rather than later, please cast your vote here.

Filed under Fonts & Type, GREP, Page Layout Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Using character styles for dot leaders

July 4, 2019 Leave a comment

The topic of tabs and leaders has been covered on InDesignSecrets before in a 6-part series but it’s worth sharing this particular tip as it saves me plenty of heartache in my day-to-day role.

Usual technique

The usual practice of creating a dotted line (usually for either leading up to a page number in a table of contents OR preparing a space for users to add information to a handwritten form) is often accomplished by the tabs feature. For example:

This is achieved by making a paragraph style that has a tab stop that has been right-aligned to the end of the text frame, and in the leader text field of the tab dialog box, a period has been entered, and it is this period that repeats to generate the dotted line.

Issues with this technique

However, I find this is quite restrictive in terms of:

My preferred technique

Instead, I prefer to make a character style called “dotted line” giving it the dotted line appearance that I’m after in the underline panel of the character style dialog box.

If more control is required, I can also prepare a stroke style specifying the dot style and frequency that the dots appear.

I can then either apply the character style manually to the areas requiring the dotted lines, or I can make a paragraph style that calls the dotted line character style using a GREP style that looks for tab spaces.

Bonus tip

Note that my GREP style is looking for \t|~y rather than just \t – the ~y represents a right indent tab. For dot leaders that need to go to text at the end of a text-frame, I prefer to use a right indent tab instead of setting a right align tab, because if the text frame changes width and I want the right aligned item to remain right aligned to the text frame, I don’t have to adjust the tab stop of the right align tab.

To insert a right indent tab, press SHIFT+TAB. This will work anywhere in a text frame except within a table where it will highlight the previous cell. To apply a right indent tab inside a table, either insert one via right-clicking to call upon the contextual menu, then navigate to Insert Special Characters, Other, then Right Indent Tab.

Otherwise, it can be called upon by opening the quick-apply menu via COMMAND+RETURN on Mac (or CONTROL+RETURN on Windows) and type either Right Indent Tab (or, if you’re really lazy – nt tab as highlighted in pink in the figure below).

Filed under Page Layout Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Features or Speed… why not both InDesign?

May 19, 2013 Leave a comment

porquenolosdos

After a recent post discussing the complications of indexing a rather large InDesign file (1600+pp), it is worth mentioning another issue encountered with the project, namely the reduced speed of InDesign.

There are already several articles concerning “slowdowns” while working with InDesign, namely:

http://indesignsecrets.com/why-is-indesign-soooo-slow.php

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4815713#4815713

Put simply, the larger the file became, the harder it was to work on. Little things such as placing the text cursor between words resulted in a spinning beachball of death for five minutes before the cursor once again became a text cursor.

Disabling several features in InDesign made the file somewhat workable:

1. Display performance – to these settings :

slowdown01
2. Pages panel – turn off the preview for the actual pages:

slowdown04
3. Turn the preflight panel off:

slowdown05
4. Live screen drawing – never:

slowdown03
5. Dynamic spelling off:

slowdown02
6. Do not use GREP styles or Nested styles
7. Do not use index entries or cross references

While this made the file workable, it was at the expense of the good features of InDesign. The slowdown was to the stage where using a word processor to accomplish the same task was considered!

Within the preferences, there is no ability to control the amount of RAM reserved for InDesign to use, nor is there the ability to control how often InDesign autosaves to its backup… something that is possibly slowing InDesign down even further.

Some of the features of InDesign were not necessary for this task as the project was completely black text supplied by the client, so having a lower quality display performance without seeing the page previews was not an issue. Preflight was not a concern with this particular file given that it was black text within one rather long text-frame and the spelling was to remain as the client provided the artwork.

Initially there was concern that turning GREP styles off would limit the control of “runt lines”. GREP styles had also been used for formatting of particular words, but because no type was going to be added, performing a one-off find/replace using the relevant GREP was able to remove the need for GREP styles. It was amazing to see the difference in speed when the file had the GREP styles turned on, opposed to when they were not applied – in this project the GREP styles were a major contributing factor to the file’s slow performance.

Followers of this blog will be familiar with several GREP styles that have been used to correct names or details within variable data campaigns. After this experience, it would appear that GREP styles are better suited to projects where content will be added dynamically (such as a Data Merged file) or constant alterations need to be made; rather than static documents – especially where no new content will be added.

The project DID have to be indexed (as discussed in a previous post) and found that once the file was indexed, the speed of the file slowed to a crawl.

Filed under GREP, Page Layout Tagged with , , ,

Never Break-up on a Date… or a name… or a time…

March 9, 2013 4 Comments

In issue of 52 of InDesign Magazine, Sandee Cohen provides a brilliant and simple solution to a problem that many designers face – how to control widows and orphans on paragraphs (this is separate to page-defined widows/orphans). Download the issue to read about this handy tip.

Her advice is great, but can go one step further. Her solution can be adapted to not just fixing paragraph widows/orphans, but also any situation where a type should not break, such as:

  • Dates (e.g. 31 July)
  • Names (Mr John Citizen)
  • Times (4.00 pm)

The example here is an article about the Adelaide Phenomenon known as “Mad March”. The dates at the end of the article are breaking, and so is an individual’s name. These have been highlighted in Magenta to illustrate what needs to be fixed.

shot1

Part of Sandee’s fix, without revealing her magic trick, is to create a unique character style that only has the “no-break” attribute turned on and everything else left off.

shot2-first

The paragraphs in this text have a paragraph style applied that will undergo some GREP style magic. To do this, the paragraph style has to be edited, particularly the GREP styles portion of the dialog box.

shot2

Firstly, the dates have to be fixed. Click the “New GREP Style” button and select the “no-break” style that was made earlier, and then in the “To Text” field, type the following:

\d+\s(January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December)

This will look for any number followed by one space and followed by any month written in full. Anything that matches this will now have the “no-style” applied. Don’t click OK just yet, but click once in the grey box just underneath the field that was just typed to refresh the page.

shot3

Fixed. Now let’s fix the name Mr Paul McDermott. Still in the same window, click the “New GREP Style” button again, again using the “no-break” style, but this time in the “To Text” field, type the following:

(Mr|Mrs|Miss|Ms|Dr|Sir)\s[\l\u]+\s[\l\u]+

This will look for any name that has a title, initial or name, and surname. Yes, this is a basic GREP code and a better one could be written to encompass all sorts of names, but for this demonstration it will do. Click OK.

shot4

Voila! All fixed. The advantage with using these GREP style fixes as opposed to using non-breaking spaces or forced line breaks is that if the copy changes for whatever reason, many of the forced breaks don’t have to be removed. Non-breaking spaces are a hassle so if they don’t need to be made, why bother?

shot5

This article has focused on two instances where a no-break character style (with some GREP style magic) can keep names and dates together, but there are other uses for this such as times, dollar values… the list is up to you. As usual to see how this was done, feel free to download the sample here.

Filed under GREP, Page Layout Tagged with , ,

Ninth of November Rumblings

November 9, 2012 Leave a comment

Has been a while since I’ve written a general “What’s going on” post. Many things have happened this year, but among the most noteworthy would be:

Move to Openbook Howden Design & Print

As of 14 November, Openbook Howden will be my new employer, having served at another printer for the last four and a half years and contributing to:

  • 2011 Excellence in Craft award (PICAs) for “Alfred James Company History”
  • 2011 Excellence in Print award (PICAs) for “The art of Jeremy Boot”
  • 2010 Excellence in Digital Craft award (PICAs) “Sir Joseph Banks Journal”
  • Preparing PDFs for Print presentation for the Adobe Users Group of SA (AUGSA)
  • Various VDP, javascript and brain-breaking projects which were undertaken, especially the last VDP 8pp book!

I’ll miss the old crew, but won’t miss one colleague’s constant whistling! Nevertheless, it’s time for a change and to bring on the new projects.

Chance to assist Marc Autret with his “HurryCover 2.0” script

For those not familiar with the name, Marc Autret is a Developer and Graphic Designer at StudioEditorial in France. He is also a brilliant scripter and has produced some must-have scripts that no copy of InDesign should be without, among them being:

  • BookBarcode, a paid script for making the EAN13 barcodes which appear on books;
  • Wordalyzer, a paid script for making “Wordle” style graphics;
  • PageBorder, a free script for applying or removing a border to pages simply so clients can see the trim edge of odd-sized artwork;
  • Speeech, a free script for creating comic-like speech bubble effects;
  • His latest effort, HurryCover 2.0, a beta script (soon to be a paid script) for creating hard cover, soft cover or dust jackets for books.

During the year I had the opportunity to assist with the HurryCover project and, while it worked on the machine at home, would have issues on my old work mac. After several back and forths of versions to test with myself and many other beta testers, Marc has produced a brilliant script which any InDesign user should definitely add to their repetoire. For more information on Marc and his work, visit his website at Indiscripts.

Discovery of two major GREP styles

Since InDesign CS4, the software has supported the pattern-based application of styles better known as GREP styles. Often overlooked by many users, this feature has been invaluable on many VDP projects, but more specifically its ability to:

  • Make “square pegs fit round holes” by being able to auto-size the type based on the length of how many characters were in a line and then adjusting the character height/width percentages; and
  • “Hiding” text by applying no fill/strokes and changing the character width to 1% to literally hide characters which shouldn’t be there.

The odd mention here and there

Even though I wasn’t there, I had noticed that my blog had been referred to in a slideshow by the Paris InDesign Users Group (IDUG) as “Un site à voir pour les fans de la fusion de données!” (A site to see for fans of Data Merge!) The slideshow also featured some of the more complicated examples of Data Merge that I’ve done such as the piecharts and paragraph swapping. To Loic Aigon for mentioning this blog in the show, a big thankyou – Merci Beaucoup!

Also, during the usual posts on the Adobe Forum specifically for InDesign users, the respected and regular contributor to the forum Peter Spier graciously referred to me in one post as being the “Resident Expert of Data Merge”, a title which is quite a compliment. Having said that, like any other user I always learn from others and still have lots to learn myself.

So I think that’s it for now!

Filed under News Tagged with

Swapping paragraphs during Data Merge

October 13, 2012 Leave a comment

A recent post on the adobe forums raised an old question which I’d been happy to consign to the too-hard basket, and that question was how to import text as part of a data merge. While text can’t be imported into a merge à la importing pictures into a data merge (i.e. can import image files such as JPG, EPS, PDF, TIFF… but not text files such as DOC, RTF etc) I knew there had to be a workaround.

The workaround came in the form of using a field from the data merge to trigger a GREP style. To demonstrate this, I have created an example in the form of this case study:

An electronics store is preparing a mailing of its statements, along with a with compliments slip which is specifically targeted to each customer. The store has prepared a database with an ID to correspond with the statements, the client’s first name, and a code that corresponds to the campaign, which happens to be:

  1. Good payers
  2. Online shoppers
  3. Recently filled out an in-store survey
  4. Long time customers
  5. Dormant customers
  6. Due for a phone upgrade

Each merge has its own text, so the typical way of handling this would be to perform six separate merges, but because the with compliments slips have to go with statements that are printed in ID order and the client does NOT WANT the ID to appear on the with compliments slip, the merge must be prepared once and in order, so this is not an option.

Instead, I have created an InDesign file with two layers – a base with the static data, and then a layer that I have labelled 1 (to represent the good payers). For now, the text for the first campaign is added, along with the letters |xxxx| at the start of each paragraph, and the text is formatted using a paragraph style called changingpara1 – so far, it contains nothing out of the ordinary… yet. This will make more sense soon.

The other campaigns are literally duplicates of layer “1” but named appropriately (2,3,4,5,6) and contain their appropriate content. For the ease of creation, only the base and layer being made are viewed at any time. Until the data is imported, I’m just using first names.

Using the data merge palette, the data “namesdb.txt” is imported, and the |xxxx| portions are replaced with |<<number>>| but still retain their “|” at the start and end of the field code. Again, for ease of working with the layers, only the base and layer being made are viewed at any time.

As Heston Blumenthal would say… this is where the magic happens. With no text selected, two character styles need to be created:

Hide

  • Horizontal scale to -1, and
  • no fill nor stroke

Black

  • Black fill only

Now, viewing only layer “1”, the text box is selected and the paragraph style assigned to it is changed, namely:

  • No fill nor stroke, and

  • GREP styles

apply Black style,

to text: ^\|1\|.+

(this will find the start of the line and |1| followed by everything in the paragraph)

apply Hide style,

to text: ^\|1\|

(this will find the start of the line and the |1| only so it can be hidden)

But something unexpected has happened… the type has disappeared! This should happen… so far… pushing on, view only layer two, click on the textbox and in the paragraph styles palette, duplicate changingpara1 BUT change its name to changingpara2 and change the GREP styles this way:

apply Black style,

to text: ^\|2\|.+

(this will find the start of the line and |2| followed by everything in the paragraph)

apply Hide style,

to text: ^\|2\|

(this will find the start of the line and the |2| only so it can be hidden)

Repeat this for the remaining layers, so that layer “3” text has the “changingpara3” paragraph style that, in turn, has the GREP styles which show/hide text with the letters |3| at the start of the paragraph, and so on for the other layers.

After doing this, make sure all the layers are visible and turn the “preview” on the Data Merge palette. Suddenly, the text seems to come to life, responding to the values in the “numbers” field.

The picture above represents the records in the data merge and how they change from record to record. Alternatively, watch the video of how a similar campaign was assembled:

As usual, all files associated with this demonstration are available in the merged PDF file which can be downloaded here.

 

 

 

Filed under GREP, VDP Tagged with , , ,

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