Running headers with initial words

[BR22]

I am putting together a dictionary where I have used a character style to format the initial word or words of each entry, and the style is set in the entry paragraph style 'Initial Words' settings dialogue box. When I try to use the character style in a running headers field to get the first and last use on the page, it doesn't think the character style is on the page at all. Using the paragraph style doesn't work for this purpose. The only way I can think of to fix this is to remove the Initial Words setting and manually set the character style on the first words of each entry. This is not an appealing prospect as there are many entries. I'm hoping someone has another suggestion.

There is another issue with these running headers that sometimes comes up. If Publisher decides to move a paragraph to the next page due to some spacing requirement like a 'Space before' setting, the running header will show that entry as the last entry on the previous page, even though none of it is visible on that page.

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, BR22 said:

When I try to use the character style in a running headers field to get the first and last use on the page, it doesn't think the character style is on the page at all.

A right royal pain. What you have to do is... sigh, This may be a lot of work for a dictionary and all its entries. Find and replace a word at the beginning of a paragraph with Paragraph Style Entry (if that is what you called it). Replace it with itself using the character style. Now you can find it.

Find:

\b(.+)\b      with Entry as the paragraph style.

Replace:

\1       with that character style as the character style.

 

I've come up against this and I honestly don't know if it is a bug or by design. I have a memory of this being brought up yonks back and cannot recall what the explanation was.

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

A right royal pain. What you have to do is... sigh, This may be a lot of work for a dictionary and all its entries. Find and replace a word at the beginning of a paragraph with Paragraph Style Entry (if that is what you called it). Replace it with itself using the character style. Now you can find it.

Find:

\b(.+)\b      with Entry as the paragraph style.

Replace:

\1       with that character style as the character style.

 

I've come up against this and I honestly don't know if it is a bug or by design. I have a memory of this being brought up yonks back and cannot recall what the explanation was.

I don't see how that resolves the problem. The Running Headers use Paragraph Text Styles, not Character Text Styles, so what does the Replace operation accomplish?

[prophet]

4 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

yonks back

As a "Yank", I had to Google "yonks" as I'd never heard it before.

[walt.farrell]

18 minutes ago, BR22 said:

There is another issue with these running headers that sometimes comes up. If Publisher decides to move a paragraph to the next page due to some spacing requirement like a 'Space before' setting, the running header will show that entry as the last entry on the previous page, even though none of it is visible on that page.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying there. Can you provide a picture or sample file to demonstrate?

[Old Bruce]

7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I don't see how that resolves the problem. The Running Headers use Paragraph Text Styles, not Character Text Styles, so what does the Replace operation accomplish?

It allows for the Running header to find the word(s) using the Character Style. So only the initial word is chosen, not the entire paragraph. I used this hack for winkling out the range of Chapter Numbers on each page in a version of the KJB. Here it is the initial word in an entry of a dictionary.

Apple. A fruit, or tech corporation.

It will find "Apple" and not "Apple. A fruit, or tech corporation." If I use My Bold Character Style for the initial word in the Paragraph Style's Initial Words setting then, currently, we cannot find My Bold using the Character Style in the Running header section. So we have to find the initial word in the paragraphs and reapply the character style. Same problem with Find and Replace.

[Old Bruce]

36 minutes ago, BR22 said:

There is another issue with these running headers that sometimes comes up. If Publisher decides to move a paragraph to the next page due to some spacing requirement like a 'Space before' setting, the running header will show that entry as the last entry on the previous page, even though none of it is visible on that page.

Pretty sure this is a bug, I cannot believe that this is by design. I have resorted to editing the Master Page for that actual page and turning off the text frame with the Running header. Or you might have to delete the Running header on that actual page.

[MikeTO]

This is actually easy to do with running headers. You don't want to find the Initial Words character style but the paragraph style and then set the running header to use a delimiter to extract just the words formatted as initial words. That delimiter might be / or ( or something else depending on your dictionary format. If there's no delimiter because you're just using whitespace between the term and definition then insert one of the special spaces (hair, third, en, whatever you want) and use that as the delimiter.

[Clarification since I didn't write this clearly, it almost reads as if you can't use a running header based on character style. But if the character style is used for the Initial Words or Drop Caps features then the running header field won't be able to find that style because it's not applied directly to the text. In this case you have to set the running header to the paragraph style with a delimiter.]

Here's an example dictionary that demonstrates how to do this with running headers and delimiters.

rh.afpub

Edited January 31, 2024 by MikeTO
Clarification

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Pretty sure this is a bug, I cannot believe that this is by design. I have resorted to editing the Master Page for that actual page and turning off the text frame with the Running header. Or you might have to delete the Running header on that actual page.

This is definitely a bug. I used this feature for a dictionary example in the 2.1 version of my manual and I still have that test document and it doesn't work properly in 2.3.1 so a bug must have crept in.

There seem to be a few symptoms of this so I'm going to do some more testing and will then report my findings.

[MikeTO]

I started a new thread in the bugs forum since there was more than one issue:

[BR22]

20 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying there. Can you provide a picture or sample file to demonstrate?

I've attached an example file. The word "in" is shown as the last entry on the first page when it is actually on the second page. This file shows another bug, the second page running header is just not showing at all.

DictTest.afpub

[BR22]

18 hours ago, MikeTO said:

This is actually easy to do with running headers. You don't want to find the Initial Words character style but the paragraph style and then set the running header to use a delimiter to extract just the words formatted as initial words. That delimiter might be / or ( or something else depending on your dictionary format. If there's no delimiter because you're just using whitespace between the term and definition then insert one of the special spaces (hair, third, en, whatever you want) and use that as the delimiter.

rh.afpub

Thanka for the suggestion. I had been using a colon as the delimiter, and after your post I realized that I had colons in some of the entries, so I was optimistic that switching to Em space as delimiter would fix the problem, but alas, it is still broken in strange ways. Now it chooses some random place in the text in the first column as the First on Page, jumping over actual Em spaces. It also doesn't look back to the previous page as advertised to get the current entry if the page doesn't start with a new entry. I can't reproduce this in a small test case. I've included a screenshot of what I'm seeing. This is using the entry text style for the running header and using Em space as a delimiter.

[MikeTO]

Yes, those are the bugs I listed in my bug forum post.

You're not going to be able to do this for now - running headers don't work with paragraph styles that are used for all of the paragraphs. They work only for paragraph styles used as headings with body paragraphs between them, and for character styles. And of course you can't use character styles because yours are being applied by the Initial Words feature.

I don't see a way to do this until the bug is fixed without using a workaround and you probably won't like it.

The bugs are due to having multiple paragraphs in a row of the paragraph style targeted by the running header. To work around it, you have to break intersperse those paragraphs with paragraphs formatted with a different paragraph style.

Your document has 12 pt space after. You could cut that down to 6 pt and press Return between every paragraph, formatting those blank paragraphs with a paragraph style set to Leading Exactly 6 pt with Space After set to 0 pt. This would be a pain to do for a book the length of a dictionary but I just tried it and the running header feature works fine if you do it.

Good luck.

[Old Bruce]

8 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

The bugs are due to having multiple paragraphs in a row of the paragraph style targeted by the running header. To work around it, you have to break intersperse those paragraphs with paragraphs formatted with a different paragraph style.

Works if you manually* apply a Character Style to the initial words. Then use the Character Style for the style in the running header.

 

* See my first post in this thread about using regex and find and replace.

[MikeTO]

3 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Works if you manually* apply a Character Style to the initial words. Then use the Character Style for the style in the running header.

* See my first post in this thread about using regex and find and replace.

Yes, character styles applied directly to text work with running headers. Character styles applied indirectly by Initial Words, Drop Caps, and Bullets and Numbering do not work.