Show Nested Character Styles in Character Palette

When a character style is nested in a paragraph style it would be nice if the Character palette highlighted the character style used when text with that nested paragraph/character style is selected.
It would also be nice if when a character style used in a nested style is changed on the page (and not through the character style) if then the "Redefine Style" option from the Character palette fly-out menu could be used to redefine the style.

I posted this in another thread before I discovered this one:
I just upgraded to Pages 5.
I opened a document that I'd been working on in the previous version of Pages. It has several styles, incuding a bulleted list style called "main bullet".
I attempted to apply that style to a section of text, and while it did indent the text properly, it did not add bullets. (Also, in the Style panel a bullet does not appear next to the "main bullet" style as it does in Pages 4. This was my first clue that something was wrong.)
So I went back in the text to a bulleted list that uses the "main bullet" style. I selected the text, then went to the Style panel and chose "main bullet" > update style. This did not seem to help. The "main bullet" style still has no bullet next to it in the Style panel, and when I tried again to apply it to some text, the bullet doesn't appear.
I decided to try a different style, in this case "body". I went to a section that has the "main bullet" style, selected it, and applied "body". The indentation changed, but it did not remove the bullet as it was supposed to.
Is this a bug, or do styles work differently in Pages 5?
It appears that styles do not include formatting like bullets, which, if true, is a huge problem.
I was also upset to learn that once I've opened a document in Pages 5, I can no longer open it in Pages 4. So I'm essentially stuck with Pages 5 whether I like it or not.
Is anyone else noticing this?

Similar Messages

Apply Clear Overrides after creating such character styles...

Hi everyone,
After importing the Word document into InDesign CS3 in some of the paragraphs there is some style overrides. The InDesign styles formatting are not intented with the paragraphs properly. Eventhough the word styles are mapped with InDesign styles exactly. If i select all the paragrahs and click the option "Clear Overrides" from the paragraph styles palette, all the InDesign styles formatting are applied properly but the character style formatting get removed. So i have planned to create script to character style for each font style and each formatting of the characters. After doing this i can clear the overrides of paragraph styles without hassle. I have created the script to create character styles for character formatting and its working fine but when i tried to run this script for 2nd time in the same document it showing some error in it. Please find my script below and it is too big,
//To find Font styles and character formatting and replacing it with character styles
//Script for CS3
#target InDesign
var myDoc = app.activeDocument;
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("Itl") == null){
var Itl = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "Itl", fontStyle: "Italic"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("bl") == null){
var bl = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "bl", fontStyle: "Bold"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("bItl") == null){
var bItl = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "bItl", fontStyle: "BoldItalic"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("bItal") == null){
var bItal = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "bItal", fontStyle: "Bold Italic"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("sb") == null){
var sb = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "sb", fontStyle: "Semibold"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("sbItal") == null){
var sbItal = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "sbItal", fontStyle: "Semibold Italic"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("blk") == null){
var blk = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "blk", fontStyle: "Black"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("obl") == null){
var obl = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "obl", fontStyle: "Oblique"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("li") == null){
var li = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "li", fontStyle: "Light"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("liItal") == null){
var liItal = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "liItal", fontStyle: "Light Italic"});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("sup") == null){
var sup = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "sup", position: Position.superscript});}
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("sub") == null){
var sub = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "sub", position: Position.subscript});}
app.findTextPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.changeTextPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.findTextPreferences = null;
app.changeTextPreferences = null;
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Italic";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = Itl;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Bold";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = bl;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "BoldItalic";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = bItl;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Bold Italic";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = bItal;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Semibold";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = sb;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Semibold Italic";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = sbItal;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Black";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = blk;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Oblique";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = obl;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Light";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = li;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.fontStyle = "Light Italic";
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = liItal;
app.findTextPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.changeTextPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.findTextPreferences.position = Position.superscript;
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = sup;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
app.findTextPreferences.position = Position.subscript;
app.changeTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = sub;
app.documents.item(0).changeText();
function setupFindText(find, change, foots, hidLayers, lockedLayers, lockedStories, masters, caseSensitive) {
app.findTextPreferences = null;
app.changeTextPreferences = null;
try { app.findTextPreferences.findWhat = find } catch(e) {};
try {app.changeTextPreferences.changeTo = change } catch(e) {};
app.findChangeTextOptions.properties = {
    includeFootnotes:(foots == null ? false : foots),
    includeHiddenLayers:(hidLayers == null ? false : hidLayers),
    includeLockedLayersForFind:(lockedLayers == null ? false : lockedLayers),
    includeLockedStoriesForFind:(lockedStories == null ? false : lockedStories),
    includeMasterPages:(masters == null ? false : masters),
    includeCaseSensitive:(caseSensitive == null ? false : caseSensitive)
} // end setupFindText
alert ("DONE");
please suggest how to simply this script and make it run faster can anyone suggest me. Also suggest me to how can add this "Clear Override" syntax with this script. I want to make this script very effective. Thanks in advance to all.
Regards
Thiyagu

The reason for that error is easy.
if (myDoc.characterStyles.item("Itl") == null){
var Itl = myDoc.characterStyles.add({name: "Itl", fontStyle: "Italic"});}
means "if the style does not exist, create it and assign it to the variable". What happens when it does exist? (I'll let you think of an answer here.)
Why don't overrides work? Well, let me ask you, does it work when you do the same directly in the program? No: to clear overrides, replace a style with itself. Does that mean you should run the script twice? Well, no, a brief search through the CS3 JS help reveals this tantalizing function (for any text type element):
void clearOverrides ([overridesToClear:OverrideType=ALL])
Clears the specified types of override.
Parameter
Type
Description
overridesToClear
OverrideType:
OverrideType.ALL
OverrideType.CHARACTER_ONLY
OverrideType.PARAGRAPH_ONLY
The types of override to clear. (Optional) (default: ALL)
-- and I remember someone posting this rather nifty one-liner
myStory.paragraphs.everyItem().clearOverrides();
The script appears a bit Frankensteinian to me. That function setupFindText is never used; you use two different ways of clearing the find and change preferences ('null' and 'nothing' -- I believe there were some strong points against using 'null', but, anyway, you only need to set them to nothing once).
Notice it doesn't take heed of combinations of a type style and superior/inferior -- the latter will overwrite the former.
The usual way of speeding up a script is by putting repeated elements into an array, but I doubt this will help much here. On the other hand, it's just a handful of replaces, and it should be very fast already. Even if it takes as much as 30 seconds, it's still worth that time.

Why does CS6 InDesign Book epub output generate and apply new graf and character style names in CSS?

I created an InDesign book composed of documents that had had no paragraph or character styles in the palettes until text was copied over from a single overall document. I worked absolutely as clean as I could.
I synchronized the book to that single overall document several times, including immediately before exporting the book to epub. My export settings disallowed any local formatting. Character styles were restricted to one named "Italic" for which the only format applied was Italic in the Font Style field, and one named "Small Caps" for which NO formatting was included in the character style.
There was, as far as I can see, no reason for any character or paragraph styles to export to anything but identically-named CSS entries. That is to say, any text with the character style "Italic" applied in the InDesign doc should have output with the same text with a span class entry of "Italic" around it.
I still ended up with p and span CSS entries with extra numbers appended to them:
span.Italic {
font-style:italic;
font-weight:normal;}
span.Small-Caps-1 {
font-variant:normal;}
span.Italic-1 {
font-style:italic;
font-weight:normal;}
span.Small-Caps-2 {
font-variant:normal;}
span.Italic-2 {font-style:italic;
font-weight:normal;}
span.Small-Caps-3 {
font-variant:normal;}
span.Italic-3 {
font-style:italic;
font-weight:normal;}
and
p.x-SECTION-BREAK, p.x-SECTION-BREAK-1, p.x-SECTION-BREAK-2, p.x-SECTION-BREAK-3 and so on.
Why would the InDesign epub output engine choose to generate and apply new spans and paragraph-level styles, which multiply the complexity of editing the CSS directly? How can I prevent InDesign from doing this?

Perhaps I wasn't clear. When I wrote "an InDesign book composed of documents that had had no paragraph or character styles in the palettes until text was copied over from a single overall document" I meant to emphasize the part where I CLEARLY said "UNTIL text was copied over." The text I copied over had plenty of paragraph styles. I was trying to point out that each individual document had no PREVIOUSLY EXISTING character or paragraph styles that might have added complexity to the epub output. .
So, every paragraph in each document had a paragraph style attached, a total of maybe 20 different paragraph styles throughout the book. The only CHARACTER LEVEL styles I cared about exporting were Italic, for text that was set in italic, and Small Caps, for CAPITALIZED text that I wanted to be able to make smaller in the CSS, since I am not allowed to embed fonts and therefore have no other way of creating small caps in the xhtml files inside the epub.
So, given that I had two character styles applied to various bits of text throughout my InDesign book ("Italic" and "Small Caps"), I would like to know why there are multiple CSS entries generated: Italic, Italic-1, Italic-2, Small Caps, Small Caps-1, Small Caps-2, and so on.
Ditto paragraph styles. I had a paragraph style called "SECTION BREAK" in each document. Not only did paragraph style "SECTION BREAK" contain identical specs in each document--I know they did because I copied each from one single doc where they were being used identically--but I also synchronized the book repeatedly. So why would the xhtml docs and the CSS output need p.x-SECTION-BREAK-1, p.x-SECTION-BREAK-2, and p.x-SECTION-BREAK-3?

Para/Character Style Name show by script

Hi,
Every one (Specially John Hawkinson) Sir i have one more question. Question is that my InDesign CS4 Sample file lots of character style (Nested Style) on my single paragraph style. Is this any script (Java/Apple) show Paragraph/Character style name show where these style apply.
(1) This is paragraph style
(2) First character style on (paragraph style)
(3) Sec/Third character style on (paragraph style)
After run script
thank you
regard
snegig

Well, this one is not easy.
There is not a good way for scripts to add display adornments that are not objects in your document. That's possible with plugins, but not really with scripts.
But a script could add arrows and boxes and soforth to your document, such as on another layer.
So yes, it's possible for you to have a script walk through your document and call out style names. It sounds like it would be a pain. I don't know of an existing script that does this, but perhaps someone else does. (I'm only answering since you asked me explicitly...)
Sorry, good luck.

New character style not showing up in TOC style

I created a new character style called Subchapter....
Then I went to layout>toc styles.. and hit [new]. Under "Style" my new character style "Subchapter" is not there. Also, under the "Styles in Table of Contents....include paragraph styles.." my new character style "Subchapter" is not in the other styles list.
What am I missing?
Thanks.
Also, forgot to mention, I am in book mode at this point. Maybe I need to add that new character style to each .IDD chapter of the book?

NEvermind, it was because I was making a character style, not a paragraph style. Now it shows up.
Thanks anyways.

My table of contents does not use the entry style I select for words in the paragraph that have character styles applied to them in the chapter, so some of the letters are showing up as green, which is fine in the chapter but not in the TOC.

My table of contents does not use the entry style I select for words in the paragraph that have character styles applied to them in the chapter, so some of the letters, specifically parameters, are showing up green, which is fine in the chapter but not in the TOC. I can manually fix this in the TOC by changing the character style to none after the toc has been generated, but I don't want to do this.

What application are you running? Please ask this in the forum of the product you're using.

Numbered bullet character style with underline not showing

Hi,
I have a paragraph style for numbered bullets where I've used a character style for the numbered bullet.
The character style has an underline applied so the effect looks like white text on a blue box, the blue box being created by the underline.
The 'Paper' coloured number is showing, I can see it by placing a coloured box behind the text box to test.
But the blue underline is not showing. When I apply the character style on other text it works fine.
Could this be a bug?
InDesign CC, Mac OS X 10.8.4

Thanks for responding.
"Paper" is the colour I am using for the character colour and then using another named colour for the underline.
But it is happening the same as you suggest in your screengrab.
In my screengrab below I have put in a black box to show that there is no underline appearing!
And my paragraph style with that character style applied:
So how do we submit this as a bug? And why hasn't it been fixed before now?!!!
thanks.

Can you create a ToC with nested character styles?

I'm creating a technical guide document, and for ease of formatting within document creation I've used nesting character styles within the 'Body' paragraph style. I need to reference the second level headings within the ToC, but I since I can only use the 'Paragraph' styles in ToC creation - can I do this? (I'm using InDesign CC)
The document looks something like this, with the italics indicating the nesting structure and the ** indicating what needs to go in ToC.
1. Our Story (separate paragraph style, not an issue)
1.1 Random Title Goes Here ("Body" paragraph style, nested "Heading 2")**
Body text now, all over here, several paragraphs, etc. ("Body" paragraph style, nested "Body")
Subheadings - not required in ToC ("Body paragraph style," nested "Subheading")
1.2 Random Section Title goes here ("Body" paragraph style, nested "Heading 2")**
More body text, you get the gist. ("Body paragraph style, nested "Body")
Basically, I need to build my ToC with the Heading 1 and the Heading 2, but Heading 2 is nested in "Body" paragraph style.

Nested styles are NOT a TOC style function, it is only available in a paragraph style. But when you choose a paragraph style to be written into your TOC based on another Para Style, most likely a headline, you can define such nested styles in this para style.
But a TOC entry can only include a complete paragraph, a single one. You can make a Para Style, let's name it TOC1 which draws the information from Headline 1, but not for headline 2.
This TOC1 can include nested styles (or GREP styles).
Another way to define chara styles automatically is via the TOC style definition. Styles there will override any styles which come from nested and GREP styles. (But this does not necessary mean, that they have no functionality any more, because ID's styles are only partially defined and leave room for other elements of a style to be used together.)

Trouble nesting more than one Character Style...

I am trying to create the below heading in CS5 on a Mac:
Lesson 2.1: Who am I?
So I made the Lesson 2.1 a character style called "Lesson #." And then I made Who am I? a paragraph style called "Lesson title" and nested the "Lesson #" though 1 colon. And that worked great. But then I felt like the space between "Lesson #" and "Lesson Title" was too big. (This seems really nit-picky I know but the boxes the lesson titles need to fit in are small and the titles vary in length so I was trying to save all the space I could for the longer titles.)
Lesson 2.1: Who am I?
So I made the space (see the underline above) a character style of it's own that was the same as the "Lesson Title" in all aspects except that it was 11 pt font. I then made this a nested style in the "Lesson Title" that came after "Lesson #" through 1 letter.
But it doesn't seem to be working very well...which made me question if there was something else I needed to do in order to nest more than one character style? Or whether I should be even approaching this issue in this way....
Thank you for any thoughts on this!

YES!!! IT WORKED! I think InDesign and I are now friends. All my styles are working! (knock on wood.)
Weird that the horizontal scaling would work though and not changing the font size? or maybe I jsut don't understand exactly how InDesign thinks yet...

Jump Character Style in FM Showing up Wonky In RH

Using TCS 2.0 (RH8 and FM 9). Linked project, the Jump character style in FM (sets a hyperlink), when generated in RH is including extended text. So for example [mylink is showing up like this] instead of like [this] (brackets used instead of underline since I can't get that to work). It seems to be random how much extended text RH decides to link. I'm inclined to think this is a bug and wondering if anyone has experienced this problem and if there is a workaround other than post processing in RH to fix it.
What I have done is just remove the jump from my FM docs and have the URL spelled out. Though it would be nice to get the jump style to show up correctly. There does not appear to be an alternate style I can map it to in RH to hyperlink.
Thanks,

Further to my original post, further info as follows:
Platform: Windows XP, SP2 both PCs that this happens on are fully functional for Graphics we run CS3 Master Suite, Corel, Quark, etc.
Weve applied the patches, through the Adobe Updater (the download link doesnt work) version is 8.0p273
We used the File - Save As PDF option saving as either a High Quality or X1a PDF (but weve tried all types, to rectify the problem it persists with all options).
Thanks again for any help!

How To Add Glyph to Character Style?

Specifically, i want to add the "math x" as a Character Style. The font is Adobe Janson Pro, and the "glyph" (what we used to call a "character") is present. I could add by hand, but i have a lot of them. In the menus that define the character(s) you want to add, i can't find an option that will add a *specific* character-- in this case the math x. Or an accented character, for that matter (ü?)
Thanks very much.

Okay, I see. I tried one more thing -- since the Symbol character for the math x font is option-y (which is the "yen" symbol in most fonts) I tried having the Nested GREP apply a character style including the Symbol font to all option-Y characters -- but Indesign is too clever for that, and shows an empty box (since there's no Yen symbol in the Symbol font).
I give up. Keep the "Glyphs" palette handy, and once you've entered one math x symbol, it will be on the "recently used glyphs" row, and you can enter them by double-clicking. Or, you can search for space-x-space and replace with space-math x-space where needed.
Rodney

JS:CS3 Newbie needs help! find/change character styles

I'm new to scripting and JavaScript is giving me a headache, but I'll keep trying. What I'm trying to do is automate a few things so that the production time of our school newspaper is reduced while insuring accuracy.
I've played around a little with the text find change sample and the changing or adding paragraph styles in the InDesignCS3_ScriptingGuide_JS.pdf and I barely understand what I'm doing.
When us page designers receive text to place in the document, our editors mark the text with tags like: text, where the word "text" is to be bolded. (there wouldn't any spaces between < and b and > etc. I just did that so It'll show up here). We have basic character styles and paragraph styles set up, and we just started working with nested styles.
Is there a way we can search for the tag and bold everything after it up until the tag? Sort of the way it does for html (the way it would do for this message if I took out the spaces). It'll be great if it could remove the tags as well, but if not, I know I could create a find/change script to do the removal afterwards.
I appreciate any input.
Thanks!

You've not found yourself the easiest of tasks! You need GREP find/replace, not text. Do you have any experience with GREP? It's worth investigating, it's a powerful feature. The script below handles bold. For clarity, it doesn't do any error checking: it assumes that there's a document with text in it and that the document contains a character style called 'bold'.
// talk to Indesign, nobody else
#target indesign
// reset the Find/Change dialog
app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;
// find everything between and (including these codes)
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '.+?';
// add 'bold' style
app.changeGrepPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = 'bold';
// make the changes
app.activeDocument.changeGrep();
// now delete the and codes
app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '</?b>';
app.changeGrep();
You can adapt it easily to handle other codes, and at a later stage you could generalise it so that you needn't repeat whole bunches of code.
Good luck with your first forays. Again, it's not the easiest of tasks, but it's worth getting to grips with.
Peter

Automate character styles?

Tuesday morning, I have to sit down and pop hundred and fifty summer events into a flyer. Choice A is easy - I can print them and type them. In the shower, though, I began thinking about Choice B, and I don't know whether InDesign can do what I want.
I have control over the database where they're hosted, and it's pretty easy for me to pop them out in the format
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Date - Time [carriage return]
Event name
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Date - Time [carriage return]
Event name
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Date - Time [carriage return]
Event name
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
which is all the information I need on this document. On the finished product, though, I want Date and Time to have character styles applied (for color and weight). It's not that hard for me to assign hot keys to Character styles and do this by hand - just twenty minutes of tedium.
But!
Could I format this as
(where the symbols are just unique symbols)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ªDate - ∞ £ Time ¡ [carriage return]
Event name
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and then use a Find/Replace function to tell InDesign
- in the case of " ª . . . ∞ ", apply character style "Date style"
- in the case of " £ . . . ¡ ", apply character style "Time style"
and then go through and delete all instances of ª, ∞, £ and ¡
(Extra spaces applied for ease of reading)
Or, if I'm imagining this wrong, is there another way I can format the original data to automate the application of styles?

I don't even think you'd need grep for this.
I'd create two paragraph styles, one for date/time with the next style being event name and event name with the next style being date/time.
Then create a character style for time and have the base paragraph style for date/time being the formatting you want just for date.
The date time style would have nested style with none through the hyphen and time through the end of the paragraph.
Place the text and then select all of it and in the paragraph styles panel right click date/time and from the contextual menu choose apply date/time and next.
That should fully format all of your text.
Bob

Conditional build tags with character styles and ignored text

RoboHelp HTML v8.0.2.208
Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3 with 2 GB of RAM
Output: WebHelp and HTML Help
I have recently moved my projects from RH HTML X5 to RH HTML 8 and this is when the following problem appeared. I use lots of conditional build tags within the help projects. Some of these tags are for my own use for reference and I combine these with character styles containing a coloured background (highlight) so that they show up in the WebHelp or HTML Help output (e.g. text to identify the software version that the field/feature/text was added, reminders to check details, insertion of bug ID numbers, design document names, etc.). These areas of text are stripped out of the final build for customers by using a conditional build expression.
What I have noticed is that if a paragraph contains text with a conditional build tag applied AND that tagged text has a character style applied AND an unknown word within the conditional build tag is ignored (with the HTML tag <?rh-ignored text="word_to_be_ignored" ?>), saving the topic, closing it, then re-opening it shows that the conditional build text has stretched to the next conditional build tag, or to the end of the topic if there aren’t any other conditional build tags. This also happens by switching from Design View to HTML View. Note that this doesn’t happen if Ignore All is applied to the unknown word.
This doesn’t just apply to projects converted from RH X5. I created a new test project in RH8 and the same behaviour was observed. Similar behaviour occurred very occasionally in RH X5 but that seemed to be down to HTML tags being nested incorrectly.
The largest project contains around 1200 topics and with many hundreds of conditional build text areas this now causes a problem. I’ll probably have to locate every ignored word in an area of conditional text within each project, set it to Ignore All and then manually remove and re-apply the conditional build tags, unless someone can come up with something clever. Can anyone else replicate this and should it be logged as a bug?

Hi Daggins,
Thanks - that is good info to have. But as we all agree, that does take away from the point of single-sourcing.
You aren't misunderstsanding exactly... I am doing all my conditional tagging in FM and it works like a charm in terms of the PDFs that I generate from FM, and even the conditionally tagged text in RH shows/hides correctly. The issue is I am also importing my index and TOC from FM... and even if I have an entire file in FM tagged as conditional (all the text is tagged as conditional, I don't know if you can tag a file as conditional), the file name as a heading it still appears in the RH TOC. There is no text... but in my view it shouldn't appear in the TOC either (it looks like just a broken link when I generate my online help) - this is not ideal.

Table of Contents based on Character Style?

Trying to do an annotated table of contents containing captions of all photos in a book, followed by verbose descriptions. Purpose is to avoid cluttering pages bearing the photos, which will have only a brief caption is followed by the name of the owner of the object in the caption, in the same paragraph.
Book will include a listing of the captions in page order (i.e., table of contents) without the owner names, followed by verbose descriptions. Can I get around this by making character styles for each (caption, owner, respectively), and create a TOC based one character style? If not, can I configure the para. style of the caption to omit the line-feed, and base the TOC on that?
Plan is then manually to add descriptions to each TOC entry, immediately following captions. Will that stay intact, if any subsequent photo locations are changed?

Jack wrote:
OK, have done that, and all required content is now showing up in the TOC.
I'm glad you managed to sort that out.
Is it possible to omit the line breaks between elements referring to the same page?
Hmmm...the thing is...a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph. By nature, it breaks to the next line. There are ways to fake it but none (that I can think of) which will hold up to an automated TOC update. Maybe someone else will come along with a trick I don't know about.
So then, for the moment let's assume the only way to get the caption and the description into the same TOC paragraph is to put them in the same paragraph on the document page. Also still assuming I truly understand the end-result you want; here's how I would do it:
If you set the separate-but-threaded caption and description frames as I first proposed, you'll need to go back and take out the paragraph break between the caption and the description. It will have to be replaced by a simple "frame break" which will push the description (now the same paragraph and paragraph style as the caption), into its own hidden frame as before.If, in the TOC, you want the caption and the description to have differing formatting, it would also be useful to insert (between the caption and the description on the document page) an End Nested Style Here character before that frame break. (If the caption and the description can be formatted identically, you won't need this step, and they can simply be formatted by your simple TOC Entry Style paragraph style.)
All above can be done using Find/Change. Find: End of Paragraph (^p). Change to: End Nested Style Here (^h) Frame Break (^R). So here's what it looks like in the dialog.
If the captions and descriptions are the only text in your document, you probably get away with Change All, otherwise it may be best to step through finding and changing one instance at a time.
Now if you update your TOC, the descriptions should be pulled up into the same paragraph as the captions.
Take advantage of the Nested Style possibility to vary the formatting of the caption and description by adding a nested style to your TOC Entry Style. Set it to style the description portion of the entry. Then add a Nested Style and set a Character Style to format the caption portion of the entry... "through 1 End Nested Style Character".

Show Nested Character Styles in Character Palette

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