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• • January 21, 2020 at 10:46 am #1223988
    Cheri Good

    Participant

    I have two variables in a running footer with the left and right pages having each in a different place. I was able to use a GREP style in the footer right paragraph style to apply formatting to only one of the variables and it works fine. I cannot seem to get it to work for the footer left and have tried various options of look behind expressions.

    This grep expression works:
    ^.+?|

    The “|” character is part of the variable, yet the style is applied as expected.

    I need to find the second variable which follows two “|” characters–also part of the variable.
    These options don’t work:
    *pplies the style to both variables
    (?<=~Y)
    *\does nothing
    (?<=\|.*?\|).+
    *\does nothing presumably because the “|” is part of the variable
    (?<=\|~Y\|).+
    *\does nothing presumably because it’s not looking for the text between the “|”
    (?<=\|\|).+

  • January 24, 2020 at 8:11 am #14323211
    David Popham

    Participant

    Hi Cheri,

    Text Variables are considered to be single entities by InDesign, so you won’t be able to parse individual characters within the variable string unless you use Convert Variable to Text. However, you then lose the ability to have it update if changes are made. Can you construct the footer so that the vertical bars are regular text, with the Text Variables on either side?

    A sample of the intended output would be helpful for more guidance.

  • January 29, 2020 at 10:08 am #14323176
    Cheri Good

    Participant

    Hi David,
    Thanks for the reply! I had originally constructed my footer with the vertical bars as text, but I had some sections that didn’t have the two variables (only one) and the bar looked out of place.

    I had taken a screen shot, but couldn’t figure out how to upload it. :) Here’s an image in dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j32gb1m4xg9ge2f/RunningFooter-2variables.png?dl=0

    I did a workaround instead of using a GREP style for the footer that didn’t work, I manually applied the character style to the master page.

    I was confused because the GREP style worked on the right-hand footer.

  • August 25, 2021 at 9:06 am #14346632
    flypig

    Member

    This explains my text variable failure as well. I use a running header text variable to pick up chapter titles, but I lose all the italics in them. This means the features cannot be used in many of my projects which are academic books and journals with references that have to be in italics. So my running headers end up all Roman and have to be done by hand. I tried GREP to find specific words in the RHs but the italic character style refused to be applied. I tried doing the italics by hand and by nested style and by internal GREP paragraph style and all were overridden.

    Commenting here so that others stop pulling their hair out and give up.

    keywords: GREP text variables character styles paragraph styles running heads

    • August 25, 2021 at 12:56 pm #14346640
      David Blatner

      Keymaster

      Yeah… the running header feature is somewhat limited. There was a plug-in from in-tools.com called PowerHeaders that provided a lot more control like this, but it hasn’t been updated in years. I keep hoping someone will update it!

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