Hey, I’m on a winner this time!

The third image shows what happens when I try to create an object style, showing in particular the Stroke section of the Object Style Options dialog box. https://members.ozemail.com.au/~pardy/indesign/InDesignScreenSnapz005.jpg. There is no provision here for specifying dash length and gap length (though that is very possible in the Stroke pallet) and that seems to be the problem.

If I use the fly-out menu in the Stroke pallet to create a custom dashed line, the space it gives for creating the dashed and gaps is a curious width, 8.467mm. If I want nice even dashes for the full length of the line, I need to divide that space into equal dashes and spaces such that it ends with a space, otherwise I get a “lumpy” line. Such mathematical tricks make my brain hurt!

So have resorted to creating one line, copying and pasting it and then manipulating the end points of the pasted line to be where I want them to be. It all seems very UN-InDesign!

OK, it has now gone midnight here so let’s see if I can get it to work this time. Maybe I had too many links or something? So I’ll try posting three messages . . .

Here is a shot of what I want to achieve. I have created this shot as the real thing tended to have other distracting features. https://members.ozemail.com.au/~pardy/indesign/InDesignScreenSnapz003.jpg. The blue “dotted” (dashed?) line links a box in an ancestry chart to another (with the same information) in a descendants’ chart.

In the Stroke pallet/panel. Everything I have done in this document has been done within InDesign. I am using InD CS6.

Woops. Accidental message deleted.

Thanks for the attention you are giving it, Gert. I need to export as text only occasionally and wonder if my difficulties warrant the attention it is getting. But another part of me is intrigued to know why the problem exists and how to solve it. Mostly the only reason I need to export as text (and it needs to be formatted text) is that a colleague who doesn’t have InDesign wants a copy of the doc so he can work on it. He is contented with Word.

No, the only spaces I have used in this doc are those produced by hitting the Space bar on the keyboard. I am working with a late 2012 27-inch iMac with OS 10.4.4 and 16GB of RAM.

I am quite happy to send you the file but it is, as you are aware, CS6 and so may behave differently in CC (and perhaps differently again on a PC, though I like to believe those days are far behind us). Naturally I would need an e-mail address. Mine is pardy[at]ozemail[dot]com[dot]au

Thanks for your reply, David. Sorry for the delay in responding but I have been away from the keyboard all day.

Sorry to have to report, but an export to .rtf opened in TextEdit still has most (but not all) of the spaces replaced with tabs. [Heavy sigh!] I haven‘t done more than a cursory check at this stage, but it seems that only two of the 25-odd paragraph styles in the document (one of them being a child of the other) have escaped the multiple tabs.

Exporting to .rtf is not something I need all that often, but it should work on those occasions when I do need it.

Thanks Bob! I kinda _knew_ there must be a way to do it. I would never have thought of using the escape key. InDesignSecrets shines through again!

Thanks for your reply, Justin. Heavy sigh at its contents! :-(