Right-indent tabs in GREP or nested styles

How do you specify a right-indent tab (shift-tab) in GREP or nested styles? Is it possible? I could only find the regular tab character.
Thanks, Phyllis

In GREP it looks like
~y
Mind you, I don't know if that will work for you - I just copied a right-indent-tab to the clipboard and pasted it into the GREP Find What field.

Similar Messages

Right Indent Tab

In CS2, with a left-justified paragraph, how do I get an line of page numbers to right-align following a Right Indent Tab?

You must use Area Type (Click and drag box with the Type Tool)
"Set type here [ hit tab ] Set Type here"
Then right align the type.

GREP/nested styles: Help needed

Hi there,
I loved GREP and nested styles from the moment I figured out what it was. But sadly I am not very good at building structures, and I can't find a GREP manual for my needs (I'd need it in German). So my skills are very, very basic, but usually I get along. Now I have a task that goes far beyond, and after one and a half very frustrating days of testing and fiddling around I figure that am stuck. I hope that anyone can help.
So this is the task: I have an Excel file, 11 columns and hundreds of lines. Those will have to go in a "list of publications" of a scientific book.
The columns are tabstop separated:
Author1 Author2 Author3 Author4 Author5 Text Title Journal Volume Page Year
The result will have to look like this:
Author1, Author2, Author3, Author4, and Author5, Text,
Title
Journal <blank> Volume, Page <blank> (Year)
So I have to insert commas, the word "and", (probably soft) linebreaks, blanks, and brackets. "Title" needs to be in italics, while "Volume" needs to be bold. The problem is that I get text corrections all the time, and the excel file gets longer and longer every day. In addition to that, some columns, like "Author4" and "Author5", and mostly "Text" are often, but not always, empty.
Is there a way to change the tabstop separated Excel lines into what it has to look like more or less automatically (or at least in just a few simple steps)?
Thanks for your help!
Best from a sunny Hannover, Germany,
Gero

I'd have saved the excel file as a Comma Delimited File
Then all your text would be converted from
Author 1
Author2
Author3
Author4
Title etc.
to
Author1, Author 2, Author3, Author4, Title etc.
Then it would have been a matter of finding a determined amount of commas to a point and inserting a soft return
and so on.
If that makes sense?

Grep Styles/Nested Styles from the end of the paragraph

Hi -
It appears that grep styles, and nested styles only allow you to apply styles from the beginning of the paragraph until the match.
I'd like to be able to apply styles from the END of the paragraph going back.
This would allow me to apply a non-breaking character style to the end of a paragraph to control "runts". You could make the last two words of a paragraph non breaking, or set a 15 character threshold.
This wouldn't work for all cases, but I'm working with centered, non-justified text, so it should work fine. If the feature were there.
I'm sure there are other things one could do with it as well.
There's a good discussion, and a MANUAL work-around on
http://pdsassoc.com/tipsCS/DeruntingParagraphs/index.html
Tom

I used your suggestion and reviewed the tutorial again.
Sometimes a missing piece of info drives you nuts.
Thanks again.
My clients will love this enhancement.
CS rocks.

Right-Indenting the last paragraph line in a Table Of Contents entry

Hi,
I'm using CS4 In Design.
I'm trying to format the paragraph styles for my Table of Contents.
I have the tab leaders working, everything looks good except that I have entries that have multiple lines, and I can't find a way to format the TOC paragraphs so that the lines BEFORE the last line are right-indented more than the last line (which of course contains the tab leads and page number).
I'd like to not have to go into my text and manually add Right Index Tabs in every heading instance that will be pulled into the TOC.
Thanks,
Robert

> How DOES one set last lines that don't leave room for leaders?
One manually breaks the line short (or lives with no leaders) using a
shift-return. I usually finesse TOCs after I think the client is mostly
done with correcting.
> I now note that some of my neat page numbers are nudged to the right...
I'm not sure what that means. If you're using a right-aligned tab (or
two tabs, if you want to right-align the ends of the leaders) your
numbers should right-align on the tab setting. Exactly. Nothing should
be "nudged to the right".
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

Using nested styles to break blocks of text into different pages

Hello everyone,
I'm treating data collected through a Google Docs form and I've already set it up so that the questions appear on the left and are followed by the respective answers sequentially so that I have a simple way to copy paste the whole information to Indesign. Then I'm going to use nested styles to define individual styles for the questions and answers.
What I can't do, however... and I'm not even sure if it's possible, is how to tell Indesign to break text that is laid out sequentially into different lines or to break blocks of text so that they start in the beggining of the next page without having to resize the text frames by hand.
As a visual example this is what the data I've exported out of excel looks like:
Question 1 (tab) Answer A1 (line break)
Question 2 (tab) Answer A2 (line break)
Question 3 (tab) Answer A3 (line break)
Question 1 (tab) Answer B1 (line break)
Question 2 (tab) Answer B2 (line break)
Question 3 (tab) Answer B3 (line break)
(and so on in groups of 3 questions)
And I want to turn it into:
Question 1 (turn the tabs into line breaks)
Answer A1
Question 2
Answer A2
Question 3
Answer A3
(and then start at the beggining of a new page)
Question 1
Answer B1
Question 2
Answer B2
Question 3
Answer B3
I can't define the size of the text frames so that the next group of questions+answers starts at the beggining of a new page because some of the answers are multi-line fields and thus the number of lines of the answers are variable and they can come short of the text frame edge or pass it.
Can anyone share some insight of how to do this (or if it is at all possible)?
Thank you very much!
MACC

Thank you very much for your input.
I'm trying to automate this process as much as possible because I don't want to have to crunch the data manually myself later on, instead just teach someone else how to do it.
The first search and replace action seems basic enough but regarding the second one I would have to manually assign that paragraph style to the line where the data would break because one can only assign character styles in nested styles, right?
Also I've heard that ID CS5 automatically creates new pages based on a template when you paste information inside the first page, is that so? That would be great because that way the person wouldn't have to manually create pages and link the contents throughout the document but instead simply open my template and paste the information within the first master page. That's not possible with CS4, is it?
Thank you very much!

Nested styles: I can't seem to make this work

I can't seem to do this nested style: All Adobe Garamond. Headline: 24/25 centered. Return. Byline: 9/10 centered, stacked. "by" is italic with a .5, one inch wide rule above. Return. Author's name is small caps with the same rule below. Return. Body text is 9/10 regular, first paragraph has a 3 line bold drop cap, the other paragraphs have a .25 indent.
Nothing seems to work when I try to set this up. Rules everywhere...and I am supposed to have the document set up in 14 hours....help!

Nested Styles are character styles added inside a paragraph style that affect only certain parts of the text, based on trigger patterns that you set up. Typically you would use a nested style to do somthing like make the first three words of a paragraph Italic, or make a price bold on a menu.
It's probably technically possible to achieve your title using nested styles, forced line breaks as triggers, and paragraph rules above and below with the proper offsets, but what you want to do is not typically done with nested styles, but rather with a series of individual paragraph styles that are applied in rotation automatically using the "next style" attribute.
Mikes example is using three paragraph styles for the heading. PStyle1 (just a place-holder name for a pragraph style here) is applied to the text Headline 2, and as part of that style defintion the "next style" is set to PStyle2. PStyle2 is applied to the By line, and its next style is set to PStyle3, which is applied to MW Design. Each of these lines is a separate paragraph (he should have shown you the non-printing characters so you could see the hard returns at the end of each line). PStyle3 should have its next style set to your style for the first paragraph of body text that includes the drop cap, and that one needs a next style set to the paragraph style for your other body text. This last body style should have the next style set to "same style."
If you are typing directly in ID, for each story, set the style to PStyle1 and begin typing. When you hit Enter to move to the by line, the style will change automatically, and will change again each time you hit Enter until you are inthe second paragraph of the body copy, where it will keep the same style until you change it manually again.
If you are working with imported text you can select an entire story froom the fiorst line of the title to the last last paragraph of body copy, then right click on the PStyle1 name in the Paragrapgh Styles panel and choose Apply PStyle1 and Next Style and the whole shebang will get the correct styles applied in one click.

Confused by right indent results in tables

Hi. Please Help. I have set an entire book of tables in indd cs3, but find my results from the tab panel erratic to non-existent.
For the examples below, text is set to left align:
1 - When the decimal tab is selected and the ruler is clicked everything aligns to it whether there is a decimal or not. (this is fine).
2 - When I select the right tab and click on the rule a line can be seen in the table at the correct position but the text does not move to align with it. (I have tried this with text aligned right, eventhough I have read Dave Blatner on the subject.)
3 - When I select the left tab and click on a rule text generally moves to the correct position but not always.
I have the following clunky workarounds, but would prefer to know why I am not able to use the left and right tabs consistently.
A - Workaround 1: set the right text to right align and then use the tab on the right to bring text into the correct position.
B - Workaround 2: use the left indent tab to set the left aligned text in the column.
In the workflow I have set up paragraph styles, used these in cell styles, and then used the cell styles in table styles.
The relevant text is in columns set below merged and centred information in the header.
I have restarted and cleared out prefs as well as exporting to an inx file but I am still not winning.
Please help as I think these tables will be repurposed for different uses and it would be pleasant to overcome the issues.
Tx
Gordon Eddey

From your screen shot I see you are using CS3, but that doesn't appear to be the cause, as the behavior is still present up to CS5.
I'm far from an expert on tables -- I hate and avoid working with them as much as possible -- but it appears to me that the decimal tab is "implied" in the cell if you set one, that is tabbing into any cell in which a decimal-aligned tab is present will move the text to the tab position. This is extremely useful for tables with columns of numbers in cells as it speeds up entry by relieving you from having to insert the tab in each cell with a number. On the other hand, the other sorts of tabs seem to be "explicit" or require you to insert the tab character into the text string in order to take advantage. This makes sense to me, more or less, also, since you are more likely to want generally left, center or right-aligned text in any cell and wouldn't need a tab to set that.
Is there a reason that setting the paragraph to right aligned and adding either a right indent to the paragraph style or a right inset to the cell style won't work as well as setting a tab stop in the definition? Do you want your right-aligned tab stops in different places in different cells? If this is something that can be controlled by a style definition, that's the way to do it, rather than by manually inserting a tab into the cell.

Creating Styles.. and then nesting styles

Seems simple enough:
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS5.5"
tell active document
set myCharacterStyle to make character style with properties {name:"Year", size:26.0, fill color:"Paper", stroke color:"Black", stroke weight:0.75, font:"Helvetica", font style:"Black"}
set myCharacterStyle to make character style with properties {name:"Years", size:18.0, fill color:"Black", stroke color:nothing, stroke weight:nothing, horizontal scale:80.0, vertical scale:80.0, font:"Helvetica", font style:"Black"}
set myParagraphStyle to make paragraph style with properties {name:"Year"}
set nested styles of myParagraphStyle to {{applied character style:"Year", repetition:1, inclusive:false, delimiter:any word}, {applied character style:"Years", repetition:2, inclusive:true, delimiter:any word}}
end tell
end tell
The font and the point size do not come through when the style is created. The nested styles also do not come through.
I tried applied font:"Helvetica" to get 'font family not available'. Also, font:font "Helvetica"...
What I get right now I is no font defined or size. The rest works.
So what am I doing wrong here?

Hi lithodora,
as Mary Posner wrote a character style doesn't have the property 'font', but 'applied font' and 'font style'.
"... specified as either a font object or the name of font family."
just look it up in the dictionary ...
Try always to work with references.
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS5.5"
    --you've got to set myHelvetica to your needs!
    set myHelveticas to (font family of every font whose name contains "Helvetica") --will return the helvetica font familiy names
    set myHelvetica to item 1 of myHelveticas --just randomly pick one for my example, hoping it's got a 'black' style ;-) ...
    tell active document
        set myCharacterStyle01 to make character style with properties {name:"test", size:26.0, fill color:"Paper", stroke color:"Black", stroke weight:0.75, applied font:myHelvetica, font style:"Black"}
        set myCharacterStyle02 to make character style with properties {name:"tests", size:18.0, fill color:"Black", stroke color:nothing, stroke weight:nothing, horizontal scale:80.0, vertical scale:80.0, applied font:myHelvetica, font style:"Black"}
        set myParagraphStyle to make paragraph style with properties {name:"nextTest"}
        tell myParagraphStyle
            make new nested style with properties {applied character style:myCharacterStyle01, repetition:1, inclusive:false, delimiter:any word}
            make new nested style with properties {applied character style:myCharacterStyle02, repetition:2, inclusive:true, delimiter:any word}
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

Unable to find Right Indent when definition contains decimal number

Dear all,
I recieved a very long text from Microsoft Word, all set to "Normal" style. How annoying...
Anyway, some of the paragraphs are set with Right Indent that it's size is 15.011 mm. To my knowledge, Indesign shows up to 3 numbers afer the period even if there is more.
The problem is that when I perfome search for this size (15.011 mm) it could not find anything and I think it's because of the hidden decimal numbers, but i'm not sure.
Any solution will be great
Shlomit

It's probably a rounding problem. I'd try to get the exact measurement directly from the Word file and enter that in the ID dialog, including the units. If that doesn't work, I know I saw a similar question here, but it was more than a year ago, so a google search would be in order.

Nested styles and textStyleRanges

HI all!
I have to recognize all textStyleRanges in my documents.
Unfortunately character styles described by a nested style are not really applied to the text and the paragraph looks like a single textStyle range.
Is it possible to apply the characterStyles from nested styles?
thanks.
Ivan

Ok. You could test every single character with the property appliedNestedStyle. That will give you an array of applied nested styles. The result would be an undefined object (case: no nested style applied) or an array of length 1 or length >1 if more styles overlap on a certain character.
Code:
var myCharacterStylesArray = myCharacter.appliedNestedStyles;
for(var n=0; n<myCharacterStylesArray.length;n++){
    $.writeln(myCharacterStylesArray[n].name)
The problem here is: which of the styles will win to format the character?
My tests are showing (and I could be dead wrong!), the last listed style in that array will list the winner.
Code for testing a selection of some characters with different nested styles or GREP styles (with overlapping results) applied:
var selectedCharacters = app.selection[0].characters;
for(var n=0;n<selectedCharacters.length;n++){
    try{
    $.writeln(selectedCharacters[n].appliedNestedStyles[selectedCharacters[n].appliedNestedStyles.length-1].name);
    }catch(e){};
exit();
If there are no applied nested styles, the try/catch will prevent this loop ending throwing an error.
Of course we have to factor in a regular applied character style as well:
var selectedCharacters = app.selection[0].characters;
for(var n=0;n<selectedCharacters.length;n++){
    try{
    if(selectedCharacters[n].appliedCharacterStyle.index === 0){
        $.writeln("The winner is:"+"\t"+selectedCharacters[n].appliedNestedStyles[selectedCharacters[n].appliedNestedStyles.length-1].name);
    else{$.writeln("The winner is:"+"\t"+selectedCharacters[n].appliedCharacterStyle.name)};
    }catch(e){};
exit();
Phew, this took me a while to find out…
Uwe

Nested style: everything preceeded by 3 spaces needs to be italicized

I'm doing a directory for a church. I got my nested style sheet to place a rule before each entry and to bold the family name. At the end of each listing, the children in each family are listed. I created a nested style for the names. I tried defining the nested style as through 3 spaces but that italicizes everything except the family name. How do I use nested style to see the three spaces through hard return and italicize everything in between?
Screen shot with tabs and spaces. The very first entry (Ainsle family) is how it should look.
Thanks in advance for your help.
[screen shot removed by host per Richard's request]

Richard,
You're a little confused about this.
First, do NOT worry about putting the em space after the names. Just do a Replace All to change instances of three spaces to an em space. (I'm assuming you didn't put three spaces anywhere else.)
At the end of the nested styles, you want to apply None up to the first em space.
Then you want to apply the character style italic until the end of the paragraph which you can define as the end nested style here character.
That should be all you need.
However, I noticed that you've got an error in the listing for Kevin Alexander and Julie Hansen. The rule underneath their names is wrong.
Finally, you ought to think a second before posting an image on the web with people's real names, addresses, emails, home and work phones, etc.
If it is possible to revoke that image, do it now!

Bulleted text with a right-aligned tab with a line leader...

I am using Pages '09 and am trying to have a tabbed line after bulleted text. I can do this in Word '11...set a right-aligned tab with a line leader then tab at the end of the text and it adds a line. When I tab after text in Pages, it indents the bullet.

Do two paragraph breaks and then delete the lat one. Now you can do the tabbed line

Nested style with Glyph?

Hello there,
I have a question setting up a nested style.
I would like to manually enter a number, followed by a tab. (the numbers can't be automatic as some are not in numerical order)
I would like the content to: stay formatted as as [none] up to the arrow, then after the arrow all text needs to be in italics.
The problem is the number of sentences will vary before the arrow (the question) and after the arrow for the answer which need to be formatted as italics.
The arrow (which is the font webdings 3, unicode is <F0C6>)
Can this be done? Or can I not specify the glpyh in this nested style? I have tried a variety of methods. Thanks for your help!

It's actually easier, in some ways, to go the other way. Format the paragraph style to use the italics, then apply a character style up to 1 arrow character (copy and paste it into the dialog) that formats the first part of the paragraph, then apply a second character style to change to Wingdings3 through 1 word.

Nested style highlights pink as if there's a missing font (?)

setting up a new document here, and trying to make the first character in each paragraph use Body 01 DROP CAPS character style. in this capture i've set it to the first three characters for testing (never mind the term drop caps; trying to use nested style here).
no matter what i set the typeface to in the character style, it won't display as nested. what would cause this?

There is a hierarchy to styles. First, the paragraph style is applied to all type in the paragraph, including any nested character styles that are part of the paragraph style definition. Next any character styles are applied, which override the formatting assigned in the paragraph style, and finally, any formatting you apply locally by selecting text and changing the parameters is applied, and that overrides everything.
Local formatting overrides show up for selected text as a Plus sign after the style name in the Paragraph Styles panel. Do you see the plus sign when you select your text? I suspect not. More likely, you've applied a default character style to everything, so no matter what settings you have in your paragraph style they will be overridden by the applied character style. As I said before, character styles are used only for selected text. They are used for "special" text that needs to be different in some way from the other text in a paragraph -- the basic formatting for the entire paragraph is defined in the paragraph style.
When you highlight an entire paragraph there should NOT be a character style showing as applied as well. The character style should be either [None], indicating that no text has an overriding character style applied, or it should be blank, indicating that some portion of the text has a character style applied, but not the whole paragraph.
Bottom line, with no text selected make sure the character style is set to [None] before you begin adding text, and only apply character styles through Nested, Line, or GREP styles in your paragraph style, or by selecting specific text and manually applying the style. Manually applied character styles survive changes to the paragraph style, and are actually the most useful if they are fairly generic, applying just a color, or bold or italic, but not specifying a face or size, so they let the face and size change to match any changes made to the paragraph style -- you usually don't want 9 pt minion bold suddenly appearing in the middle of a paragraph that you've changed to 12 pt Helvetica unless it's a product branding. Instead a style that says only Bold would give you 12 pt Helvetica Bold.

Right-indent tabs in GREP or nested styles

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