Danielle wrote:
I have a bunch of text that I want to wrap within a text frame without any regard for where the words should break phonetically. I want words to break randomly when the text reaches the right edge of the frame.
What a curious request! I can see that this could make an interesting background pattern or something — basically, text running from line to line without any hyphens at the ends of lines. I can think of one way to create this effect, though you’ll need InDesign CS3 to do it:
1. Place the text cursor in the story and choose Edit > Find/Change.
2. Switch to the GREP tab and set the Search pop-up menu to Story, so that it only affects the current story.
3. Type a period (a dot) in the Find What field (that’s the code for “find any character”)
4. Type $0~k in the Change To field (that’s the code for “the same character you found, followed by a discretionary line break”)
5. Click Change All
Here’s an example of some text… first before:
and here’s what it looks like after the GREP find/change:
Because every character is now followed by a discretionary line break, InDesign will break the line naturally after filling the frame. I hope that helps! Seems like there must be another way to do it; perhaps other people have ideas?
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on October 16, 2008
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