You should be able to do a find/replace for the double returns, jsut select the story on the layer, limit the search by STory in the Search drop down and choose “Multiple Return to Single Return” from the Query drop down at the top. It finds more than 1 hard and soft returns in a row and replaces with a return.

Does your invisible characters look like any of these https://creativepro.com/dow…..lchars.pdf ? Do they show up in Story Editor? If you can select them, then you can copy and paste into a find/replace and replace them with nothing, which should help you out. Some times other programs add extra characters that only show up when you move the data into other programs such as InDesign. I often process my data in ID to remove extra spaces, tabs, misc characters and such before doing the Data Merge.

In the find dialoag, there's a row of buttons, the first two allow for “Include Objects on Locked Layers” and for “Include Locked Stories”. Check the approppriate one for how you locked your objects, and try searching again.

Maybe you can trick ID. Have all your photos named with the same with the same dimensions, but in two different folders (a 2ch folder and a 4ch folder). Place the images for 2ch product with anchors in the copy, export/package file when the design is complete.

Then rename the 2ch folder to something else, and rename the 4ch folder to what the 2ch folder was. Open the file in ID again and it should ask you to update the images. Update the images, change the conditional text and export/package the 4ch manaul. Alternatively, instead of renaming the folder, just replace the contents, making sure you have back ups somewhere.

Haven't tested, but should give you a quick option to try.

Or after a quick test, it looks like anchored objects and be conditional text! Just a matter of selecting the invisible anchor character, apply the desired condition, then swtich back and forth like normal. That's pretty cool! I just tried with a paragraph of text and two images with two conditional text settings.Test it out and let us know if it really works on a large scale project. Although I'm thinking this means all photos of these items would need to be anchored to have them all change with a click of the button throughout the manual, so maybe my first idea would work better if you have images placed indpendently on the page?

I haven't fully tested, but one work around might be to set a Character style with a large amount of tracking (you can't set kerning in a chara style) and apply that to the em dash AND the letter preceeding it. Seems the tracking only applies to the right side of the selected character, so the preceeding character needs it applied as well to get equal spacing on both sides of the em dash. You should be able to set teh GREP style to apply to the emdash and preceeding character pretty easily.

I had to do a similar work around for TM followed by a comma or period. Grammatically it's correct to have the puncuation follow the TM, but visually it looks wrong. I created a chara style that changes the tracking for the TM/comma/period pair that moved them together for a better visual pair. The only “gotcha” was that to make it work, the puncuation has to be placed before the TM. So I have to run a find replace to swap those, but at least they're easy to spot in copy when I forget to replace them

Good luck!

I haven't fully tested, but one work around might be to set a Character style with a large amount of tracking (you can't set kerning in a chara style) and apply that to the em dash AND the letter preceeding it. Seems the tracking only applies to the right side of the selected character, so the preceeding character needs it applied as well to get equal spacing on both sides of the em dash. You should be able to set teh GREP style to apply to the emdash and preceeding character pretty easily.

I had to do a similar work around for TM followed by a comma or period. Grammatically it's correct to have the puncuation follow the TM, but visually it looks wrong. I created a chara style that changes the tracking for the TM/comma/period pair that moved them together for a better visual pair. The only “gotcha” was that to make it work, the puncuation has to be placed before the TM. So I have to run a find replace to swap those, but at least they're easy to spot in copy when I forget to replace them

Good luck!

Sounds like your file associations are off. In Bridge, check the preferences: ctrl+k, File Type Associatons> scroll down and make sure the InDesign files are set to open InDesign in the drop down. That should fix opening the files from Bridge.

There's setting in Windows as well, I'm on Window XP still, but there should be a similar, if not the same, menu options for Windows 7. Open a Windows Explorer window (“start” key + E will open it), then Tools menu>Folder Options>File Types tab. Scroll down to the .indd file extension and make sure it's set to open with InDesign. If not, click on Change button and browse to where indesign.exe is stored in the program files.

Hope that helps!