Hi Paul, I finally had a chance to sit down and test it out, and the problem isn’t happening for me.

Are you using the Move Pages command from the source doc’s Pages panel menu? That’s what you should be doing to insert pages from one layout into another. Just make sure that the dialog’s option “Delete Pages After Moving” is NOT checked. That turns the Move Pages command into a Copy Pages command.

When you click OK, the the pages are copied over to the source doc. Here’s how mine looked:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/53r1b80wc7auv8g/move%202.png?dl=0

I moved all 6 pages from my source doc (black text) to AFTER page 1 in my target doc (red text).

Here’s how the target (red text) layout looked after I moved all the pages from the black text to BEFORE page 1 of the red text:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1m2wboa6dn9f7zh/move%203.png?dl=0

Note that the first page of the page/s from the source doc you’re copying over is always a section start. If you don’t want that, after it appears in the target doc you can right-click on that page in the Pages panel, choose Numbering and Section options, and uncheck the “Start Section” checkbox.

I cannot make it appear as an Alternate Layout if both target and source docs are showing pages Vertically or Horizontally before I begin the Move operation. Perhaps one of your layouts was showing Pages by Alternate Layout before you did the Move operation? I set my workspace to Advanced and then chose Reset Advanced to “clear the decks” and keep the Pages panel in its default, view Vertically state.

But if *after* I move the pages, if I choose View by Alternate Layout in the target doc, an Alternate Layout is shown for each section.

what David said ;-) Word-authored artwork doesn’t convert. (Actual tables do, though.) You need to export to PDF then open in Illustrator to grab that art and prep it for commercial printing.

Hi Geoffrey, yes, either one is a good workflow if it works! ;-)

Best practice is to keep automation as quick and simple as possible. GREP Styles can be processor-intensive, especially if there are a bunch of them in one p style and that style is used heavily throughout. So if you can do the job with a Nested Style, then that’s a better option (not so processor-intensive). Save GREP Styles for when the automation can’t done with a Nested Style.

Michel would you agree? Or no. Curious as to your thoughts.

Is it not possible to change the paragraph style applied to these paragraphs so that you only need to change the text that precedes the colon (instead of the text that follows)? For example, you want a Bold lead-in to text that’s set in Regular/Book. That’s the more common case. But that’s not a complete solution ;-) Just makes it a little less complicated.

If you need to apply a character style to text *after* a colon, the first Nested style has to apply the character style [None] through 1 colon. This means “skip this part”. Then add another Nested style after that one that applies your desired character style to the rest of the paragraph. For example, [italic] through [and then for a stop character add something that doesn’t appear in the text, like a Section Marker, the last item in the dropdown list). ID will apply that character style until the end of the paragraph.

Okay so now the problem is what to do with those paragraphs that lack a colon. In the past the only way I’ve solved this is to manually enter some sort of non-printing,0-space-adding character in the paragraphs that lack a colon.

In this situation where you’re skipping the first bit of text, you’ll need to go through the text and in those paragraphs lacking a colon, replace a space character after the word/s in questions with something like a non-breaking space (Type > Insert White Space). That takes up the same amount of room as a space. In your Nested Style set up, in the first one set to apply “None” up to a colon, you’d click to the right of the colon and enter ~S which is code for Non-breaking space.

So: two steps. Comb through the text and manually apply a marker to paragraphs that need one. And then add that marker to the Nested Style.

To make it less complicated, you could adjust your paragraph style as I described in the beginning. If you did that, you’d just need one Nested Style that applies your “make this part look different” Character Style up to or through a colon. Then go through the text and add a “End Nested Style Here” (Type > Insert Special Character > Other) in those locations … they’d be easy to spot because InDesign will have applied the Character Style to the entire paragraph, since it didn’t find a colon.

Does this help at all?

Tough one. I was going to suggest Find/Change Object on All Documents but that will only find and change object *formats* not actually delete a found object.

Unless someone has a script, you might just need to take 30 minutes and do that manually.

AM