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• • January 2, 2025 at 6:22 am #14410185
    Teresina Jonkoski

    Member

    Hello.
    My book is set up so that each chapter title is shown on a “continued” line on all pages in that chapter. I use a variable on my master pages for that setup. Sometimes, my chapter titles include italicized words. The italics are added with a character style. Is there a way to have the variable automatically display the italics? I would like to avoid manually changing the “continued” line, but as far as I can tell, there is no option for me to set the variable so that it includes any character styles.
    Thank you.

  • January 2, 2025 at 6:40 am #14410186
    David

    Member

    There might be a script out there somewhere. It would be a good one for seasoned script writers. I found this like via Google search: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/68712/script-for-applying-character-style-on-text-after-inserting-it-from-variable

  • January 2, 2025 at 7:07 am #14410189
    Steve

    Member

    Set up your text variables as running header character styles… then reference them in that manner.

  • January 2, 2025 at 8:46 am #14410209
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    You can also search for variables of various sorts in the @ menu inside the Find/Change dialog box. So you could search for that variable and then apply a character style to it.

    To do it automatically, you could apply the character style using a GREP Style:

    5 Cool Things You Can Do with GREP Styles

    • January 2, 2025 at 11:53 am #14410213
      Teresina Jonkoski

      Member

      Thank you for your suggestions. I’ll search for a script, since I can’t get a GREP style (or character style) to carry over into my variable.

  • January 2, 2025 at 12:26 pm #14410217
    David

    Member

    Maybe if you were to use some sort of Special Character (that doesn’t add space, like a end nested style or non-joiner) between the first character you want to show up as italic in the variable of the title and last and GREP search with those parameters in mind using sets (you know, like Found 1 Found 2 etc.)? I dunno… best I can do with GREP really is find/change characters between parentheses, so I might not know what I’m talking about. You’d have to look up the actual caret code for those Special characters in order to enter them into the GREP search, but that shouldn’t be hard.

  • January 2, 2025 at 12:44 pm #14410222
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Sorry that I gave you wrong information. I did not read your original post carefully enough.

    Yes, the problem is that variables are considered a single character in InDesign! The only way to format some words inside a variable is to convert it to regular text. There is a script to do that:

    Script to convert all text variables

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