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• • February 22, 2013 at 6:04 am #64255
    Chris Court

    Member

    Morning Trendsetters,

    I'm trying to build a paragraph style to outdent a drop cap. I know the trick of inserting a leading space, then applying a negative tracking amount to it to create the outdent, however, how to build this into a style?

    Nested styles only appear to effect the characters AFTER a drop cap, and I can't figure out how to build a grep style to affect only the FIRST space in the paragraph.

    As a slightly bodgy workaround, I've made a simple grep style to track-in any ocurance of a hair space, and substituted the leading space for a leading hair space. This gives the effect I'm after, but it's kind of a pain inserting a hair space at the beginning of each story (yes, I've assigned a keyboard shorcut, but still…).

    Ideally, I'd figure out how to make the grep style apply to just the first space in the para. Or perhaps there's another approach entirely that I'm missing here…?

    Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks!

    Chris

  • February 22, 2013 at 6:37 am #64258
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I love the idea of automating this, but sadly I can't think of any good way to do it beyond the clever solutions you have come up with.

  • February 22, 2013 at 6:27 pm #64269
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Chris, a GREP style like this

    ^s

    will be applied to just the very first whitespace character per paragraph. Does that help?

    The code ^ stands for “start of paragraph”, and s is “any sort of white space, which includes the hair space. You can also use the actual hair space code here — can't recall right away what it was :) Or simply use a regular space, saving you wear and tear on shortcut keys.

    There is no way around having to insert some sort of space before your drop cap. This is the only way to outdent text out of the frame, short of kludges with anchored text boxes. Only if you have lots of outdents, you could reverse your styles: add an indent to all of your text, and then you have a margin to let anything stick “out” of the left edge.

  • February 23, 2013 at 5:55 am #64270
    Chris Court

    Member

    Genius! That's exactly the solution I was looking for.

    I'm still trying to get a grip on grep – getting there slowly.

    Thank you!

    C

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