Adding Style / Font / Color / Size rules in a tag

Controlling the styling allowed for end users.

When creating an Adobe InDesign template for web-to-print users, only a limited range of styling options are available to ensure compliance with the company's graphic charter. Users have limited freedom to apply colors, fonts, and other styling options to produce compliant documents.

The designer responsible for creating the templates must specify what is allowed or not allowed in editable text boxes.

It is recommended to use paragraph and character styles when editing to consolidate many text properties into a single record.

By default, Wedia uses auto-tagging based on styles: when an Adobe InDesign template is inserted into Wedia, editable text boxes that are not on locked layers are automatically scanned, and the list of paragraph and character styles present in each box is the only styling option available to the end user.

If this fits your workflow, there is no need to read further this document.

But sometimes this auto-tagging mode is too restrictive, and users may want to add styles that are not present in the sample text, or even allow for font and color overrides outside of the style definition.

Since version 2023.1.0, it is now possible to specify, box by box or even tag by tag, whether the end-user has the right to use fonts, colors, and character sizes beyond the paragraph and character styles present in the box or tag. Previously only the Styles options were available.

This allows for more combinations of fonts, sizes, and colors to be offered to the user than rules based solely on styles would allow, and thus increases the possibilities for creation.

Of course, rules for applying font overrides and style application can coexist.

This document provides a step-by-step guide on how to go beyond auto-tagging to edit what will be possible or not possible for web-to-print users creating documents from this template.

Applying text formatting rules:

To apply text formatting, it is necessary to isolate the part of the text that will be affected by these rules. We call this a "Tag," and it can be an entire text box or a portion of text.

To create this "Tag," display the specific tagging palette from the "Wedia" menu in Adobe InDesign.

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To create a "Tag," first choose the "Context," which can be of two types:

The most common is the use of the Wedia web-to-print module without its content management module. In this case, the context to use is "None.", and the field name is defaulted to TEXT.

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If the Wedia solution is used in a content management mode, then several types of content such as Article or Recipe may have been created and defined both in Wedia and loaded into the wedia.cfg configuration file of the plugin. They will appear in the list with a specific name, and before tagging the text box or zone, the name of the defined field (title, text, etc.) must be specified :

Creating rules from existing content:

To create a "Tag" from existing content, simply select the relevant text box or text and click the "Tag" button.

Next, click on the text with the text tool in the content box to confirm that the "Tag" has been created successfully:

In particular, the "field id" field should be filled in :

By switching to the Style tab, we can see that the plugin has analyzed the content of the box and deduced what could be offered to the user for editing: styles, fonts, sizes, colors.

Everything listed in the style options, colors, fonts, styles, etc. will be offered as options to the user:

In the Web-to-print Editor, if we save the template as-is, we will get the following options in the text editor:

Adding and removing rules

Rules can be added and removed.

The removal is simple : by clicking on the trash icon near, this will remove, for this Tag, the selected option:

Adding a color in the color list:

A dedicated “right-click” menu on the palette is available to add the selected color to the current tag :

Adding a paragraph / character style :

A dedicated “right-click” menu on the styles lists is available to add the selected style to the current tag :

Adding a font :

To add a font to a "Tag," you need to follow 3 steps:

• In the content of the text box or the piece of text that is part of the tag, style a portion of the text with the desired font and weight :

• Select the portion of text with the additional font :

• Right-click in the content of the text box to activate the menu that will scan the fonts present in the text box and add them to the allowed fonts for this tag.

The font-list will be updated for the complete tag :

Adding a font-size

Font-size a simply added using a comma separated list :

Video Tutorial

Troubleshooting

• Resetting all rules : to reset all the rules for a complete document, you may use the following option :

• Understanding the underlying technical structure.

Behind the hood, the Wedia plusing uses the XML tagging feature of Adobe InDesign.

If you are familiar with that kind on feature, you can better navigate in your tagging structure by activating the XML Structure navigation :

and navigating on the right pane of the Structure panel, which is reflected on the Tagging palette :

• Double tagging :

If you may accidently create Tags inside other Tags, this is not supported.

If you suspect this is the case, you can use the Editor that will show this double tagging like this :

and you will have to untag the additional TEXT node in the structure palette :