Significant Limitation in Nested Styles, Variables, and Section Markers

A friendly reader wrote with a complaint involving section markers: She wants to use section markers (Type > Insert Special Character > Markers > Section Marker) to pick up the Section field of the Numbering & Section Options dialog box. Great, no problem. It’s a terrific way to build running heads. Unfortunately, she wants to format the result in a special way: The whole thing should be set in one font style except the first character, which should be a large script face.

This sounds like a job for nested styles. After all, it’s easy to use nested styles to apply a special character style to the first character of the paragraph, right? But the result wasn’t even close:

As you can see, the italic face was applied to the whole paragraph instead of just the first character. Why? Well, it’s because the Section Marker is considered a single character. So the nested style is applied to that “single character” and therefore to all the text “in it,” which in this case is the whole word.

You might think that you’d fare better with a running head text variable (Type > Text Variables > Define), but sadly those are also considered single characters to the nested styles feature.

What can be done? I can’t think of a thing, besides using the old, traditional approach: Just type the text on a master page instead of using the “auto” features. Unless someone knows of an “expand appearance” type of script?

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