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I am making a song-book, and many songs have repeating pairs of lines. I want to group these lines and mark how often they should be repeated on the right hand side of the lines. Here's a crude example of what I want to achieve (this looks quite blunt, but it illustrates the basic idea):

Crude example

I'm using InDesign CS5, but I cannot find how to do this in a structured way (repeatable and consistent, not by manually positioning images or so). The accolade may also be replaced with a thin line if that makes it more feasible.

My idea was to put two block elements next to each other, one containing the lines to-be-repeated, and the other on the right containing the line and vertically centered line of text (either nested in the left box, floating right, or outside, but maintaining the height of the first). All must stay consistent with the rest of the lines of the song, so no changes in overall line distance or indentation should result out of this.

I'm planning to write a script that will generate the markup and put it on the clipboard so it can be pasted into InDesign.

If InDesign is not capable of such, what alternative would you recommend? I am considering LaTeX, but that would be quite a deviation from our normal workflow and will likely get some resistance from the rest of the team, as well as being a new learning project for myself.

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Using Paragraph Style, Character Styles and Grep Style

Song

Character Styles

Accolade: Vertical Scale and Baseline Shift

Accolade

Xlines, the repetition lines number and x: Baseline Shift

xlines

Paragraph Style and Grep Style

Inside the Song Paragraph Style set a Grep Style for the accolade \} and all the characters behind (?<=\}).+

Grep Style

After the second line type one or two tabs and }2x.

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    Brilliant! Thanks! I'll add a tab-stop to the paragraph style to keep them all consistent. This solution is much simpler than what I had in mind :-) Dec 18, 2018 at 23:23

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