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• • September 20, 2013 at 7:11 am #65452
    Andrew Morgan

    Participant

    Hello,
    I’m trying to work on a job that will use the data merge feature. In InDesign I have a table with 4 rows that copy is merging into. There won’t be anymore than four but there could be as few as one line. The tricky part is that the text styles (font and size) will be changing on the first two lines. I’m handling this by merging my data and then going back to apply text styles to the type that does change unless anyone can think of a different way?

    My next challenge arises when once the data merge is done and adds multiple pages to my ID file, I need those pages saved out separately and not only that..each needs a specific identifier (a supplied order number) included in the to the file name.
    The long way I would have to save-as…delete unwanted pages…and then re-name and save. Maybe I’m missing something that would make this project easier?

    I can give more information if I’m not clear enough…thanks

  • September 20, 2013 at 8:31 am #65453
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Not sure what you mean by the first two lines changing. Why will it change? What’s different?

    As for the splitting up of pages, check out this:
    https://creativepro.com/split-up-data-merged-pdf-files-into-smaller-files.php
    (though naming the files is going to be tricky; maybe a script)

  • September 20, 2013 at 9:41 am #65454
    Andrew Morgan

    Participant

    Thanks for the quick reply David. What will be changing in the first two lines would be the font and size of the copy. If I’m working with a table of 4 rows 4 in InDesign, sometimes I need the first row of my table to be 12pt Times Italic and sometimes I need the same 1st row in my table to be 14 pt Helvetica Medium…all this of
    course being merged from the same column in a spread sheet. I guess I’m try to apply two styles to one table cell at differnt times… which pretty much seems impossible so I was thinking I would have to apply styles manually.

    Aslo, thanks for the links to extracting. I will be checking that out…

  • September 20, 2013 at 10:19 am #65457
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Yes, it sounds like you’ll likely need to change the format manually, unless there is some clever way to identify the two kinds of paragraphs.

    For example, I once worked on a project where we put one special character (like an asterisk) at the beginning of certain lines. Then we did a find/change to apply a paragraph style to any paragraph that had an asterisk at the beginning, and then another to remove the asterisk. This took some set-up in advance, in the spreadsheet, but in general it’s often faster and more efficient to set up the original data like this first.

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