Reply To: Joke book layout tips

As per your request, here’s how it worked out —

Here is a screen shot of what I did in the end.
I tried out all the ideas given here and in the end decided that Anne-Marie’s worked best for me.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3pvbchegj9bz9i/joke-book-layout.png?dl=0

The book included:
Riddles with answers
One liners
Facts related to the joke being spoken by the book series’ mascot
Longer story-type jokes

I also added a separator between consecutive riddles with answers which were made of up a hand-drawn emoji type font with a rule behind it.
The one liners and stories have line above/after to separate them.

The client provided the file as a Google Sheet.
Since the majority of the jokes were riddles with answers, I brought in just the first column of text to get one long file of jokes/riddles.

I used search/replace to replace every end of paragraph with 3 end of paragraphs.

I then selected all the text and applies my “joke” style and the next style to create the pattern of joke, answer line (a blank line with the correct spacing to accommodate the anchored text box of the answer), and divider.

Then I brought in the answer column and used the script Anne-Marie noted to split each one into its own text box. I flipped them and shift-dragged them into the empty lines that were waiting for them.

As I went along, I changed the style on the one-lines and stories and deleted the extra spaces after them.

When that was done, I added int he blurbs manually. I had the character in 4 different positions and had them sitting in a library. I dragged one out, switched the text, and anchored them into place with their own par style to ensure correct spacing above and below.

Finally, I went through the dividers and inserted letters at random – each one a different face. I originally set this up as a numbered list with letters and while it worked great, I didn’t like all of the faces so I wanted to stick to specific keys.

The book has over 350 jokes and I was able to do all this in about 4 hours.

I hope this helps someone.
Thanks again all for your help. It was fun to figure this out.