What about approaching it from the other direction, applying the brackets via a style where you want brackets and having the running heads pick up the “pure” text?
Regards, Chris.

When you say sort by colour, do you mean:
• alphabetically by the name of the colour?
• or by a predetermined colour listing?
• or alphabetically by the name of the area denoted by the colour?
I’d have thought that the third would make most sense to the catalogue reader.
In any case, sorting the data in a tool outside InDesign (Word table, Excel etc. etc.) before laying it out would seem like the best option. Then you can use sorting data (e.g. colour name) which you don’t need to export into InDesign.

There’s a tip on sorting within InDesign on this site here: https://creativepro.com/sort-paragraphs-text-indesign.php
but it’s about paragraphs, which may not work in your situation.

Chris.

Not just printers being reluctant – I’ve customers who currently use versions back to CS3. The only thing I’ve done is put a reminder in each customer folder: an empty folder named ” is CS3″ or whatever, named such that it appears first in the list.
Otherwise, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve opened a file and got a * ahead of the name to denote it’s been opened from an older version, or the reverse, usually a message about missing plugins.

Have a google for “pdf splitter using bookmark for filename”
– there are a number of PDF splitter programs about which might meet your needs (I haven’t tried them). If you can use the style for the name on the card to produce bookmarks (via a TOC) in the massive PDF, then the splitter can extract individual files, named by bookmark. Apparently.
Good luck,
Chris

Managed to achieve it (more or less) with UP and TO at half the point size of the rest of the text, no space between them, baseline shift to get UP up and TO down, then kerning between the P and the T adjusted as far as it will go (-1000).
That’s not quite enough in the fonts I was using, but adusting the tracking and horizontal scaling of the UP and the TO is just enough to shunt them into the right position.
Is that what your styles were doing?

Regards, Chris.

What proportion are the irregularities? If they’re not so many, maybe start with the alternate row tints as the default table style, then adjust the exceptions afterwards?

If you have to do it manually, you can speed things up with keyboard shortcuts for “select row”, and cell style shortcuts for “tint” / “no tint”. Then select a whole cell at the start of the table, and go down with the down arrow on the keyboard, using your shortcuts as you go. Easy to get into a rhythm I find.
Also, if there’s a common paragraph or character style applied to the irregular rows, use find/change to find that style, set up a shortcut for “find again”, and combine that with the other shortcuts.
Still a manual process, but can be surprisingly fast.

Have you looked into InDesign Books?
File..New..Book and add individual INDD files to each book. You can have the same file in more than one book.
Worth a try?

Sounds like a data processing job for something database-y:
Take the text out of InDesign, separate into a table of columns (space-separated), sort out the two-namers from the three-namers and adjust, then reorder the columns of the table.
Import back as a table, apply the styles to text in the relevant columns, then convert the table back to text and done.

Unless someone has a grep or scripting way to do it within InDesign?

Edit: if they don’t, get in touch and I’ll volunteer.