My problem seems as if it should have a really simple solution, but after searching everywhere I can think of, I haven’t found anything that will work.
Here’s the specifics:
My company’s name is fairly long, and so after the first time we name the company, we usually use a shortened and specially formatted version of the name. As an example, say the company name is Brown Corporation, Inc. Upon subsequent entries of the name, we use BROWN, in all caps and italized.
I have created a character style that provides the correct formatting, and could probably use a GREP style, or GREP find/replace command to apply the style to the appropriate text (although I haven’t quite gotten my head around GREP, so that would require an extended learning process). However, doing that requires that I remember to run the search and replace after inserting all of the text, and it seems like that adds an additional step that should be easily eliminated. Ideally, I would create a custom keyboard shortcut that would easily allow me to insert the correctly formatted text with just a few keystrokes.
I don’t know if this would be best accomplished through scripting, or using some combination of Text Variables and Quick Apply, or…
Seems like it should be a fairly simple task to achieve–why doesn’t InDesign have a record actions feature like Photoshop does? It would make automation so much easier for those of us who just don’t have the time or brain capacity to learn a scripting language just for small simple tasks.
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