Ana,

Hmm. I posted a response yesterday; however, I don’t see it here. In my response that did not post, I talked about whether the client would want to flexibility to provide the book digitally to readers. Something to consider.

May I ask what your solution was? Did you drop the list of endnotes into excel, parse the number into a separate column and then paste into InDesign?

Furry,

If you have a large quantity of items within the group, you could create a shape with no fill or stroke color and create your custom path.

If you want to group this invisible shape with the rest of the items, ensure that you group it first. You can then select the individual shape from the group and apply your settings. I am pretty sure that if you apply the settings first and then group, you will loose the wrap.

Furry,

I know that you can’t do that on CS5.5. I don’t recall with earlier versions.

Diving into your grouped objects and applying individual text wrap options and boundaries seems like the only solution.

Ana,

Could you provide some additional information? To my knowledge, you can’t do automatic non-sequential numbering similar to your description. If you provide some additional details, we might be able to provide a solution.

How are the lists formatted in Word?
How are these lists being used in the document.
What purpose do they serve (table of contents, indexes, etc.).
Do you have the range of possible numbers? Will is always be 1-10 What is the max number?
Feel free to add anything else that might be relevant.

Sue,

You can use Grep Find/Replace to paste your graphic into your layout.

Open up Find/Change and select the GREP tab.

Assuming that the sequence numbers are digits only and that you have one space between the digits and the product name, you could try the following steps.

Copy the dingbat to your clipboard then use the following find/replace:

Find:
^(\d+)( )

Replace:
$1$2~C

^ The caret is used to signify “look at the beginning of the paragraph”
() Items within parentheses are considered subexpressions, which are important for the replacing aspect.
\d References any digit
+ Indicates one or many of the previous character.
$1 Indicates sub-expression 1

So to spell it out. Look at the beginning of a paragraph for one or more consecutive digits, as sub-expression 1, with a space immediately following, which is sub-expression 2. Then replace with the results of sub-expression 1 followed by sub-expression2 followed by the contents of the clipboard (your dingbat).

You can modify this to suit space before and after the dingbat.

Let me know if this works. If not, id me more than happy to help with additional questions. If you need to send any examples my email address is my first name AT my last name .us (all lower case).

Candi,

I know this is an old post; however, I have a similar workflow for organization charts in the AEC industry.

I use a fixed value for my organization charts. You can apply the following grep expression and James Fritz’s guide an on percentage based styles to get the desired result. https://creativepro.com/creating-percentage-based-styles.php

I will assume that the name, title, and post-nominals are on one line and each individual has a separate text frame. Add a Grep Style with the following expression:

,.+

Your associated character style could be a fixed value or it could apply the aforementioned percentage based styles described in James’ guide.

In regard to removing the first comma, physically removing it would require a grep find/replace. I don’t think that InDesign’s grep has the ability to match the first instance only. If it did or if there is an expression that can do the same, you could then hide the character. A character style with horizontal scale under the advanced character formats set to 1 percent and the fill color set to none will make the character invisible. My first thought would be to do a Grep Style that looks for all commas that are not preceded by a comma anywhere in a paragraph. Lookaheads can have expressions; unfortunately, lookbehinds are fixed. A grep guru might be able to assist.

Definitions
, A comma is a literal value
. A period refers to any character, including a white space character
+ A plus sign indicates one or many of the previous character

Ralph,

I cannot answer that question. Hopefully someone else can chime in.

-Justin

Ralph,

I believe that the solution to your second scenario might solve the first.

Are the images just placed in-between two threaded text frames or are they anchored into the text? It sounds as if you have them sitting between the text frames or over the frame with text wrap turned on. If so, consider anchoring these objects. Look for the solid square on the top of your object frames located in between the top-center and top-right adjustment points. Drag from this marker to your text. It will anchor to the text and automatically export in the proper order. In addition, consider keeping hidden characters turned on so that you can see the anchor point.

In regard to your first scenario, threaded text frames are considered to be one item. I assume that you want them to be separate in order to properly order the images you have placed in-between. Anchoring your images to the desired location should take care of that.

Let me know if that solves your problem.

-justin