CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • February 2, 2011 at 3:00 am #58605
    Eric Chapman

    Member

    I am not exactly a power user of InDesign (I'm on CS4), but I'm learning more and more all the time. I'm stumped by my latest ID challenge. If anyone could help me, I'd be very grateful.

    I need a 9-column layout on a horizontal A4 spread of multilingual text. Different translations of the same text are on both left and right pages of the spread. It's a polyglot of Biblical texts in which each Bible verse is one “paragraph” (actually each verse [other than the first in a chapter] follows a forced line break “n”). My challenge is that I can't figure out how to make it so all the “paragraphs” (verses) in all 9 columns automatically start at the same vertical location on the spread based on whatever column had text the lowest for the previous “paragraph”. I.e., there will be various amounts of white space between “paragraphs” in different columns since the text for the previous verse in one column will have been longer than all others, then for the next verse a different column will have the longer text, etc. I need to have an automatic solution since data will be placed time and again over the course of the project, so doing it by hand paragraph by paragraph is not an option.

    I have made up an ID CS4 template and have sample data inserted in it. If a power user would be willing to help me out, I could send the .indt file off-list. Maybe a script is needed? Or maybe it's simple and I just can't find the solution :)

    Thanks!

  • February 2, 2011 at 3:02 am #58606
    Eric Chapman

    Member

    What shows in the previous post as “n” was supposed to be “[backslash]n”. It is the GREP code for a forced line break. Sorry I don't know how to escape the backslash so it shows up.

  • February 2, 2011 at 9:43 am #58616
    Stuart Horner

    Member

    I would suggest that you create a table with 9 columns and a row for each paragraph. Because table cells auto expand to accomodate the text they contain, the height of the entire row will adjust accordingly. The stroke and inset values of the cells can be set to zero so that it does not appear as a table when previewed.

  • February 2, 2011 at 11:21 am #58617
    allisonK

    Participant

    Try using the tools on the alignment panel.

    Window >Object & Layout > Align

    This should have an option that will solve your problem.

    If you want to learn about some of the other tools in InDesign, consider attending this InDesign webinar I am hosting, which shows how to create a newsletter. I know it's not exactly what you are making, but the tutorial might be helpful to you: https://bit.ly/elNXbs

  • February 2, 2011 at 12:45 pm #58619
    Eric Chapman

    Member

    stuarth64 said:I would suggest that you create a table with 9 columns and a row for each paragraph. Because table cells auto expand to accomodate the text they contain, the height of the entire row will adjust accordingly. The stroke and inset values of the cells can be set to zero so that it does not appear as a table when previewed.

    ---

    Thank you for the idea. I have never yet used tables in InDesign. :) Some questions came to mind:

    (1) Can I place text flowing it one paragraph at a time into table cells? The text is either WORD or .txt or .rtf. Although it would be divided into 66 sections (books of the Bible), there would be a total of 31102 cells for only ONE column for the entire book! Cutting and pasting little pieces or splitting up the text file would be impracticable. It'd be great if I could automatically assign text pieces (up to a forced line break) into the cells and have the table automatically add new cells until there are no more text blocks (paragraphs) to add.

    (2) Will the cells flow to the next page okay automatically?

    (3) Can the table to across the entire spread, not page?

    Any other advice on learning to use tables well?

  • February 2, 2011 at 12:47 pm #58620
    Eric Chapman

    Member

    allisonK said:

    Try using the tools on the alignment panel.

    Window >Object & Layout > Align

    This should have an option that will solve your problem.

    If you want to learn about some of the other tools in InDesign, consider attending this InDesign webinar I am hosting, which shows how to create a newsletter. I know it's not exactly what you are making, but the tutorial might be helpful to you: https://bit.ly/elNXbs

    ---

    Thanks for our input. Problem is that the text boxes are “objects” and they don't need to be aligned, but the paragraphs in them need to be. I tried what you suggested, but couldn't find anything that would help.

  • February 2, 2011 at 12:58 pm #58621
    Eric Chapman

    Member

    Eric said:

    (1) Can I place text flowing it one paragraph at a time into table cells? […] It'd be great if I could automatically assign text pieces (up to a forced line break) into the cells and have the table automatically add new cells until there are no more text blocks (paragraphs) to add.

    ---

    I found this, so I guess it is possible to “map” clipboard data across cells. I'll have to play with it and see how it works. I'm not sure as to whether Cmd-D (“Place”) will work the same way or not. I'll work with it, maybe tomorrow, and see what I can do. Looks promising.

    From: https://www.adobepress.com/arti…..p;seqNum=3

    “Pasting Data Into Tables

    You can paste data into a table, but before you choose Paste from the Edit menu (or press Command-V/Ctrl-V) pay attention to what’s selected. If the text cursor is flashing inside a cell when you paste, InDesign pastes all the data into that one cell. If you select the cell itself (press Esc to toggle between selecting what’s inside the cell and the cell itself), and if the data you’re pasting has tabs or carriage returns in it, InDesign maps the clipboard data across more than one cell. If you need to update the data from an Excel document that you’ve turned into an InDesign table, you can copy the cells in Excel, switch to InDesign, select one or more cells in your table, and paste.”

  • February 3, 2011 at 9:55 am #58633
    Stuart Horner

    Member

    You can paste the text into a highlghted cell and each hard return in the text will trigger another row (by default, hard returns create rows and tabs create columns) so providing there are no tabs in the text it will be confined to a single column.

    As long as the text frame spans 2 pages then so can your table. The table can be autoflowed into as many spreads as necessary by clicking on the red overflow sybol on the text frame's out port. With the cursor now loaded, add a second page and shift and click inside the empty text frame (you will need to have created a text frame on the master page spread first).

  • February 3, 2011 at 10:01 pm #58640
    Eric Chapman

    Member

    stuarth64 said:

    You can paste the text into a highlghted cell and each hard return in the text will trigger another row (by default, hard returns create rows and tabs create columns) so providing there are no tabs in the text it will be confined to a single column.

    As long as the text frame spans 2 pages then so can your table. The table can be autoflowed into as many spreads as necessary by clicking on the red overflow sybol on the text frame's out port. With the cursor now loaded, add a second page and shift and click inside the empty text frame (you will need to have created a text frame on the master page spread first).

    ---

    Excellent! Thank you. I haven't been able to get back to this project yet, since another has taken precedence. But your comments and advice are helpful. I needed some help since I was at a standstill. I'll post more after I have time to work on it some more. I appreciate your taking the time to help me out.

  • February 10, 2011 at 6:33 am #58691
    Eric Chapman

    Member

    stuarth64 said:

    You can paste the text into a highlghted cell and each hard return in the text will trigger another row (by default, hard returns create rows and tabs create columns) so providing there are no tabs in the text it will be confined to a single column.

    ---

    Well, Stuart, I've been trying to paste text into table cells and have the various paragraphs “trigger another row”, and have had no success. I've copied 5 paragraphs of text, making sure there are hard returns after each paragraph, and then selected a table cell (Cmd-slash or Escape when in cell) and pasted (Cmd-V). Everything goes into one cell. So I tried Place (Cmd-D) and selected a saved MS Word file with that data. Same result. I turned on “Show Import Options” after selecting Cmd-D and tried various things there when importing the Word file, but still no success. What might I be doing wrong?

    The only way I can find to work around this is to create an Excel spreadsheet, paste the data in there (it correctly pastes into one cell per paragraph in Excel, staying in one column). Worse case scenario, I could do this, but it's cumbersome. Whenever I have to reimport the .xls file, I have to re-size the cell widths manually. Any advice would be most appreciated. Thank you.

  • February 10, 2011 at 10:12 am #58692
    Stuart Horner

    Member

    Hi Eric, I can think of no reason why it would do this as you seem to be doing everything correctly. As a test, you could paste the 5 paragraphs of text into a text box, then with the text highlighted, select “Convert Text to Table” from the Table menu. This would prove that the source text is not to blame. If this works, convert the table back to text, copy it, create an empty table and try pasting that into a highlighted cell.

  • February 10, 2011 at 6:44 pm #58705
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Try this which works in CS5 and, if I recall correctly, also in CS4: select the text in any one column (Select All), then go Table > Covert text to Table and set your preferences and you should now have each para in a separate cell.

    However, this doesn't necessarily solve the problem of the tops of the paras lining up. You may have to go through manually and add a Return at the end of certain cells to make sure they all run to the same depth across the page.

  • February 11, 2011 at 7:48 am #58707
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Why not just align your text to snap to the baseline grid? That way, no matter what spacing there is between lines or paragraphs, they’ll all fall on the same exact plane.

    Highlight the text, (or set this up in your paragraph styles) then click on “align to baseline grid” from the Paragraph panel. Do this for each of your translations.

    To adjust the spacing between the lines, go to Preferences > Grids and set the “Increment Every” to a smaller or larger pt size (this is basically the leading). You might have to experiment with the pt size to get your text spaced correctly.

    Doing this, you won’t have to fuss with tables or aligning text boxes.

• Author
  Posts