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• • May 2, 2014 at 6:08 am #68267
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I’ve many doublet poems which are formed in this way:

    Verse 1:
    Hallowed by thy name,
    O my Lord

    Verse 2:
    Any isms I do not mind,
    Atheism is my real find.

    Like this and so on. My task here is to align the second line in such a way that the two are vertically straight.

    Also, All first lines are by default center aligned.

    i.e

    Desired output

    Verse 1:
    Hallowed by thy name,
    O my Lord

    Verse 2:

    Any isms I do not mind,
    Atheism is my real find.

    There are 1000s of verses like these.
    is there any technique to achieve this? can we make a grep to acheive this?

  • May 2, 2014 at 6:14 am #68268
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    The basic idea here is that the second line indenting value should be based on how much the first line is aligned. I apply center aligment of the whole document and I have to move the beginning of the second line in such a way that it starts in the same distance as the first line has from the left corner of the page.

  • May 2, 2014 at 6:42 am #68269
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    If you notice for instance the line
    “Hallowed be thy name” is at a distance of 25 mm from left margin i.e H is 25 mm from left. The whole document is center aligned, so there is no necessity of formatting on the first lines of the doublet.
    Consider the second line -”O my lord” The word O is 30 mm from left margin. I have to make the second line beginning at a distance of 25 mm from left. i.e O is in perfectly in line with H of first line i.e. 25 mm.

    Please help me out as I am not clear regarding how to align the second line in same distance as the first line. There are 1000s of verses like these and manual working on all of them will finish all of my time. A little insight on how to achieve this would help a lot.

    Greatly appreciated for your time and help.

  • May 2, 2014 at 7:47 am #68271
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Hi Ramesh and welcome to the forum.

    I’m not getting your view. Why do you want to vertically align when the text is center align.

    Secondly, if all the text needs to be vertically align then why not opt for Justify-Left alignment. And if you want to keep the text in the center of the page or box, then just add some left indent.

    Would it be possible to send some screen shots, pdf to examine it more deeply.

    Lastly, you cannot upload images or files directly on forum. Therefore, you have to upload them to some third party file transfer system such as hightail, flicker, dropbox etc and just paste the link or url of that uploaded file.

  • May 2, 2014 at 8:23 am #68274
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi Masood,
    Thankyou for your time and feedback. Pls give me some time and I’ll upload a screenshot. Can’t upload now bec I’m using my phone for sending this message. Pls help me out as I’m going through a great struggle. Thankyou.

  • May 2, 2014 at 8:32 am #68275
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Sure, Ramesh, we all are here to help and share knowledge.

  • May 2, 2014 at 9:31 am #68278
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    I think what Chandru is trying to do is align the entire block flush left, but the block centers on the longest line.

    That is, everything is flush left, but the block of type centers visually on the page.

    Something like this:

                                       Line One
                                       Another line of Type

    The lines are flush left but they center as a block on the text measure.

    So far as I know there is no way to automatically do that, GREP or otherwise. I know years ago it could be done on the Penta and Miles systems, but those were unix-based.

    I deal with poetry like this all the time, and it can’t be automatically done. You just have to figure out the space from the longest line to the outside margin, and add a left indent to the lines.

  • May 2, 2014 at 9:39 am #68280
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Dear masood and dwayne, Please look at the following link. It will give you a lot of light on the issue being faced at this moment.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/o86n9s2a5gdpdfm/Indesign.jpg

    Your first question – hy do you want to vertically align when the text is center align?
    Answer – because This is the standard of the book which we are printing. This is the standard in which we have to get our books layout in indesign.

    It is a tedious process to manually add indent to thousands of such verses.
    So that is why I wish to know if we can design a method(like GREP or Find and change) by which the whole process can be simplified.

    • May 2, 2014 at 10:56 am #68282
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Chandru

      That’s what I figured you wanted to do. I’ve done countless jobs like those as well.

      Unfortunately I don’t know of a single thing that make this automatic or any kind of search and replaces, or GREP.

      I don’t think there is a way for InDesign to figure out what the appropriate indent would be. GREP is more less search and replaces on characters and strings. I don’t think it would know how to figure out the indents from margins.

      Unless someone else knows some trick that has stumped many of us for years, I think they all have to be done one at a time.

  • May 4, 2014 at 4:59 am #68288
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    If you set up a paragraph style with an indent that you liked, you could use the fact they will all follow a digit and a colon to apply the styles to them that way.

    • May 4, 2014 at 7:34 am #68289
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Unfortunately, I believe that the indents will vary because of the way they center on the longest line.

  • May 9, 2014 at 8:17 am #68365
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    I think your best bet is to set a tab that will result in every line being “near center”.

    Like if the average line length is 15 characters, create a tab that is maybe 7 characters to the left of center.
    Then left align everything, and use grep to insert a tab at the start of every new line,
    something like…

    Find: ^(.+)$
    Replace: $1

    I know it’s not exactly what you want, but they will all be near the center
    and the left edges of all of these lines will line up. It will probably look ‘good enough’
    without spending hours doing it manually.

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