The “Setting” here that appears to independently move your text around at will is the Paragraph Composer. The Paragraph Composer is designed to calculate the optimal line breaking points all over a single paragraph, taking numerous factors into account — just to mention a few: tracking, number and position of word breaks, the optimal/desired word and letter spacing as defined in Spacing, and the deviations in space size between successive lines. For left-aligned text, such as yours here, it avoids a large gap at the end immediately followed by a very small one — it evens that out as well.

So when you think “All I have to do is move this one single word one line further to git it perfectly right”, InDesign does its calculations and notices that would make the spacing on that line visibly different from the lines before and after, and it re-calculates the entire paragraph to even things out again, leaving you to wonder what you should do to “git it right”.

Three things will help you here.

1. Don't think you know better than InDesign … Its spacing is “mathematically perfect”. Manual intervention on a single line will make it less than mathematically perfect, so ID will shrug, and adjust anyway.

2. If you do want some words to stay together, use No Break to just keep those two words together — nothing more, nothing less. ID will shuffle the paragraph around until it finds a way to make it so.

3. To gain or loose a single line in a paragraph, don't try to mess with individual “lines” (which you got cornered by). Select the entire paragraph and apply your tracking to it, in very small increments until it fits. Your suggested tracking of -20 and more makes me shiver — surely that will be visible in your output!? I never go beyond +/-10 (unless there is a real emergency going on, such as having to copy-fit a single page in between otherwise finished pages — and then I sulk the rest of the day).

Is that all you can do? No. The power and independence of the Paragraph Composer are impressive, but if you really like to micro-manage your text, and you don't mind sub-optimal linebreaks and spacing, you can always switch back to the Single Line Composer. This, in essence, behaves exactly like paragraph filling has been doing since WordPerfect 3.0 — and Quark XPress as well –, it fills up a line until it's stuffed full, then goes on to the next one.

For justified paragraphs I would strongly advise against the Single Line Composer (you can compare the results for yourself), but I must admit for left-aligned text you could try and see whether you can spot the quality difference between this and the Paragraph Composer.

To find how to use the Single Line Composer, look it up in the Online Help in “Text Composition”.

… a big beer and spirits guide …

A dream job! (Do you know how hot it is here in Holland, right now?)

There are not that many export possibilities out of InDesign for text — plain text, RTF, or, if you tagged your ID file, XML. So it mainly depends on how much you “changed” Excel's column data on merging. For example, if you merged all column data into single lines, you'd need a lot of manual work restoring the proper columns again.

If the text formatting is not important, I think you can best try exporting all to plain text. Add tabs between the original columns, then try if Excel can import tab delimited data. If it does not, replace the tabs with comma's and save as CSV — “Comma Separated Values”. I'm sure Excel can read that.

Some smart preparation in the ID document can help you as well. Is your data now put in a table? “Convert to text” is your friend, inserting tabs and new lines automatically. Unique paragraph or character styles for every (or even “some”) data item? Use that to your advantage to mark as much as you can with search-and-replace.

Jongware's Personal Recommendations:

On Windows, TextPad (https://www.textpad.com/). On Mac, TextWrangler (https://www.barebones.com/produ…..twrangler/).

Both have particular strengths and weaknesses. TextPad, for instance, can natively look up stuff in Windows CHM files — yup, those I created for InDesign's Javascript! TextWrangler, on the other hand, is much better with GREP and can edit files that are stored on a web server (when connected with a user name and password, you can select a remote file; TW will download it, you edit and close, and it gets uploaded again automatically!).

Since both are professional code editors, both have a command to jump to and/or select “matching braces”, which is a great help if you somewhere missed one. Another feature both have is the ability to fast search through a set of files, in case you just know for certain you used a certain command somewhere but cannot recall in which file.

In general you should not have to rely on the editor “fixing” your braces for you, and use proper indenting of your code blocks to visually see where you are in your script, and how many closing braces you need. That said, personally I've been saved by this particular function lots of times ;-)

GREP styles cannot react on formatting, only on text.

If you want to change the formatting of already formatted text to something else, you either have to change the character style that is applied to it, or use a regular find/change.

Yeah well. As such things go, it has greatly reduced my faith in the decency of my fellow men.

I have been working on a truly fantastic script for the past three months, one that lots of InDesigners would welcome as a valuable addition to their tool set — but then again, why should I bother if all it takes is one ingrate to put his own name under it (“Amit Verma”, in this case) and then sell it as his own creation? Keeping in mind that I don't do it for the money, I do it for the fun of it. Now that's a real party pooper.

Gosh, I got it wrong then? (After retrying) … no I did not. Almost not, that is.

First of all, if you copied my line from the post, make sure the three dots are actually three dots. The forum software translated them in an ellipsis. With that out of the way, let's experiment.

Does it work? No. Why not? There are no “unused styles” in my test document.

Next try, with an added style. Does it work? No. Why not? The first line on its own does select this one style, but the “Delete styles…” command fails. Why? When there is only one style selected, the menu actually reads “Delete Style…” — singular. Changing the 2nd line to this exact text makes it — finally — work as expected; and so does adding one more unused style and using the original lines.

Can you “count” how many styles are selected after the first line? No. Only thing left is to wrap this line into a try … catch statement, and if one fails, try the other (and that may fail as well, if there are no unused styles or — insiduously — your Basic Paragraph Syles is “unused”). So the, uh, (I was going to say “best”!) least worse solution could be something like

1. make sure Basic Paragraph is used. Create a text frame and apply this style; delete it when done.

2. add not one but two new paragraph styles. Make sure one is not “based on” the other, because that will count as “being used”.

3. invoke “select unused”

4. invoke “delete styles …” — using the plural ought to be safe.

Lesson learned: better not try to use “menu invoke”! A quick google lead me to this thread-from-the-past, but the general idea ought still work for CS4, 5, 6 and beyond: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/500399

Look at it from another angle — or rather, direction. It's always the last two digits!

Try this:

dd(?!d)

which will match two digits and which are not followed by another digit (the test in parentheses).

Correct; that exactly is the behavior as described in the Online Help:

* Any Letter ^$

…

* Can be entered in the Find What box only, not the Change To box.

For anything involving more than a plain search/replace with static text, you need to switch to the GREP tab of the Find/Change box. Search for this:

t(?=uut)

and replace with this:

r

This will replace any tab (which must be followed by two uppercase characters and another tab) with a single return.