I am looking to learn something new here too, thanks! The font info is in the InDesign master page items that are linked to the data merge document. I have had data merge character translation issues in CS3 when using UTF formats. Perhaps this is because I generally export out a. csv file did not bring in any font or other information, just the raw text. Please correct me if I am wrong, the plain text file does not contain any font information, just ASCII text. csv format - or perhaps tabs separating the fields, which is exported from Excel. The data merge source file is just a simple text file in. Or am I wrong in this regard? There are many formatting options (UTF-8, Unicode etc). The font data is in the original Excel file, however this font metadata would be lost when exporting out a. csv file (unless UTF16 includes font metadata info?). That being said, I don't think that the Chinese font is in the InDesign file, nor is it in the data merge source. Kyle, thanks for bringing up GREP, it is not easy to learn - however it has a lot of power! The InDesign email list that I linked earlier has a few GREP experts on it and I have tried to follow their posts without too much success, GREP syntax is not easy to learn for the casual user. Any time you see "," it should be "" without the interleaving spaces.
#Indesign data merge excel how to
I don't have time to figure out how to force it to be correct.
#Indesign data merge excel code
The outer enclosing brackets define a list of things to match, the caret inverts the match (selects everything that isn't listed), "" means all printable characters including white space (which should include the carriage-return characters but doesn't), and "" means whitespace characters, which will capture the carriage returns.ĮDIT: I guess a colon followed by a lowercase P is interpreted as a code for a smily with its tongue out. This should change all characters that are not normal printable characters to the other typeface. In the "Find what:" field, enter "]" (without the quotation marks), then click on the magnifying glass icon to the right of "Change Format:," and select the font for the Chinese characters. In the Find/Change window, change to the "GREP" tab. With all of the text in Futura, select Edit>Find/Change. You should be able to do this with Indesign's Find/Change process. Please let the forum know what the solution is when you find it! The best InDesign/Automation source that I know of is here, join up and ask your question (email list):
You would obviously like to automate this task. I personally would see if the client could send you a separate database that only has the Chinese names, then you could setup a separate masterpage and data merge with the correct font. There may be some macro or other way to isolate the Chinese text in MS Excell, however that is beyond my knowledge. plain text issue? Why does TextWrangler work correctly and why does InDesign fail? You say that the Chinese looks fine in TextWrangler.what if you open the same file into TextEdit.does it display incorrectly as InDesign does? Is this a rich text vs. If the Chinese uses different fonts, then I am guessing that you need to bring in the character or paragraph sytle into InDesign so that you can map the style to a style and font in InDesign that has Chinese characters. kinda makes me sad.I thought that this may just be a simple font issue, the same font used for both Western and Chinese characters - as some OT fonts contain both character sets. I thought adobe products would improve with montly cloud fees :/ feels like it's only getting worse in some parts. + using facing pages with datamerge has been broken forever - if you need more than one page it only works with single pages. – but it could be improved a lot.Īlso i'td be nice to be able to export in. in Data break it way too easily.ĭataMerge is awesome and we use it to produce thousands of pages for Mailings, etc. and sadly enough this happens a lot.Īlso extra tabs etc. it could also end up with more clumns than it had before if it gets handled wrong. xls files.Į.g.: file seperated with tabs gets opened with different options and saved again => broken If that file had "komma" values like 3,5. CSV is very annoying indeed - you just need someone to open it with the wrong settings or save it with the wrong encoding and you're screwed – Something that wouldn't happen using.