Have you ever?
Exactly how much of the amazing ‘Find/Change’ tool have you used in InDesign. It’s actually incredible what can be done with that tool alone. Importing sheets and sheets of data from excel into InDesign can be transformed into professionally formatted information in minutes. By maximising that ‘Find/Change’ function you can genuinely save yourself hours and hours of work. I have great tutorial coming up on how we can make the most of ‘‘Find/Change’ in the next few weeks.
This tip is aimed at those getting started in InDesign and I can imagine would certainly open your eyes to the possibilities of what can be done with the ‘Find/Change’.
Let's get started...
Replacing hard enters with the amazing Find/Change tool
Have you ever had to copy and paste from a PDF and there are those incredibly annoying hard enters within the body of the copy that are automatically inserted when placing the text in InDesign. If you haven’t yet noticed it, go and give it a try! Copy and paste the body copy of any PDF article into a new text box, and you’ll see what happens.
One way to fix this would be to manually go and delete the hard enters and depending on how much copy you’ve just pasted could be the quickest way to do this. However, if there are more than a few hard enters then use your ‘Find/Change’ function.
Ensure your hidden characters are visible: Go to type/show hidden characters or simply use the shortcut (alt + cmd + I)
Copy the hard enter symbol so it’s sitting on your clipboard
In your text box select the whole text box (ctrl + A)
Go to edit/find/change or simply use the shortcut (cmd + F)
5. In the FIND WHAT field, paste the hard enter. It will appear as ^p alternatively you can simply type ^p into this field.
In the CHANGE TO field you simply need to enter a space (spacebar) – you will not see anything appear, the flashing cursor will now flash after the space.
Click CHANGE ALL and then click DONE
Now all those hard enters have been replaced with a space and all the copy should flow quite nicely. This great trick now kills two birds one stone as those additional hard enters between paragraphs have been removed as well and you can now easily adjust the size of the paragraph spacing in your paragraph tab.
Sometimes there are no additional hard enters between your paras, so I would recommend doing the ‘Find/Change’ by paragraph in this instance as opposed to selecting the whole text. What’s great is once you’ve done the first one, the settings remain so the remainder of the article should go quickly. However, if you plan on copying and pasting hundreds of pages of information and then using this method to remove the hard enters at the end of a line, you may want to give it some more thought as you’d end up removing the paragraphs. There is always a solution though and it would depend on the content but you’re welcome to drop me a line and we'll figure it out.
Have fun exploring this incredibly handy function!
If there are any specific tutorials you'd like to see, then please drop me a line and let me know what you're looking for, otherwise... have fun getting started!
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