ChrisWorks
Active member
I'm trying to achieve something with uDirect that I think should be possible but I'm not sure how it should be done.
I have a client that has a basic excel spreadsheet with about 30 names. Some of the people in the list of cell phones while others dont. Some of them have middle names while others don't. The problem is that when I go to set up my merge document in InDesign. Say for instance I set up a line with First Name, Middle Name, Last Name. When someone has all 3 of these it's fine. But when someone only wants to use First Name, Last Name what ends up happening is I get 2 spaces in between the First Name & Last Name because there has to be a space there to separate the First Name from the Middle Name even though there's not a Middle Name present. Does anyone know of a way to use the qLingo in XMPie to dynamically add or subtract this space depending on whether a Middle Name is present?
I've thought of just adding the spaces before the Middle Name, Last Name fields in the spreadsheet so that I don't actually have to use spaces in the InDesign file. This would work for this issue, but I have some other reasons I want to use conditional formatting and I cannot get it to work.
The other thing I'm trying to do with conditional formatting is when someone has 2 Titles or more for their job. The client wants to use 2 lines of space if the person has 2 titles. So 1 title on each line of type. I'm trying to vertically center the text within a box but what happens is that when I vertically center 2 lines of text but the person doesn't have a 2nd title, there just ends up being a blank line and it doesn't look centered. So I'm hoping that I can dynamically insert a return when that 2nd line is present as needed.
Anyway, hoping someone on here might know something about how this can be done as I cannot really find anything answering this anywhere else online.
I have a client that has a basic excel spreadsheet with about 30 names. Some of the people in the list of cell phones while others dont. Some of them have middle names while others don't. The problem is that when I go to set up my merge document in InDesign. Say for instance I set up a line with First Name, Middle Name, Last Name. When someone has all 3 of these it's fine. But when someone only wants to use First Name, Last Name what ends up happening is I get 2 spaces in between the First Name & Last Name because there has to be a space there to separate the First Name from the Middle Name even though there's not a Middle Name present. Does anyone know of a way to use the qLingo in XMPie to dynamically add or subtract this space depending on whether a Middle Name is present?
I've thought of just adding the spaces before the Middle Name, Last Name fields in the spreadsheet so that I don't actually have to use spaces in the InDesign file. This would work for this issue, but I have some other reasons I want to use conditional formatting and I cannot get it to work.
The other thing I'm trying to do with conditional formatting is when someone has 2 Titles or more for their job. The client wants to use 2 lines of space if the person has 2 titles. So 1 title on each line of type. I'm trying to vertically center the text within a box but what happens is that when I vertically center 2 lines of text but the person doesn't have a 2nd title, there just ends up being a blank line and it doesn't look centered. So I'm hoping that I can dynamically insert a return when that 2nd line is present as needed.
Anyway, hoping someone on here might know something about how this can be done as I cannot really find anything answering this anywhere else online.
