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I am looking for a specific design on characters or words in an Adobe InDesign paragraph.

I styled a paragraph as a little pill.

enter image description here

But I want to apply this design on a certain word in a larger paragraph with many others words. I have already tried styling some text with the "characters style" feature but I can't find my way.

EDIT :

In ask of many user, and in answer to Wolff

You right, but i already tried to did this. I wanted, if it was possible, to insert into a paragraph : an other paragraph, or shape, or wateever and apply this on certains characters or word. As we can do in html css with in a paragraph

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  • This is easily done via Character Styles. Please explain where you are having difficulty. – Scott May 7 '20 at 20:31
  • I'm having trouble understanding your problem. Are you just looking for Find and Repalce? – 13ruce May 7 '20 at 20:32
  • Perhaps that's it.. you have to find/replace text in the paragraph to assign a character style to specific words.. have you done that? – Scott May 7 '20 at 20:37
  • A GREP style can change all occurrences of paragraph to appear as pragraph – but I am reluctant to post it as an answer as I am not 100% on the actual question ... – Jongware May 7 '20 at 22:24
  • Hi. Welcome to GDSE. What do you mean by "styling characters into a paragraph"? Are you trying to apply a different character style to specific words only? Can you please edit your question and clarify what you are trying to do, otherwise it will probably end up being closed. Thanks. – Billy Kerr May 8 '20 at 12:07
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You can't achieve what you want only using styling. In InDesign the text behaves like pure text nodes in HTML. You can't add a box around single words like using a span in HTML.

You can instead paste the pill shaped text frame (or any other object) into your main text frame as an anchored object.

The pasted object now behaves like a letter in the text.

You can right-click the anchored object and select Anchored Object > Options to set up how it behaves. You probably want to set its Y Offset.

When you are satisfied with the settings you can create an Object Style so you can quickly create new pills.

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Updated answer

You need to use a combination of anchored objects, find replace and object styles. This is not a very detailed guide, but hopefully you can read between the lines and improvise a bit:

  • first, take the text for the so called "pill" and format as needed into a separate text box. when done, cut this to the Clipboard
  • do a Find/Change in the main body of text and replace that particular text with 'Clipboard contents, formatted'. this will bring your "pill" into the main text flow for each instance
  • adjust these up and down using an object style, and provide spacing left right if needed using custom spacing

Then, you can end up with something like this:

enter image description here

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  • The problem is that character style doesn't allow to shape the words "as a little pill" like the OP wants. You could apply a thick underline to get the background color but you can't get the rounded corners. You have to paste in text frames as anchored objects. (then it became too complicated for me to bother answering 😀) – Wolff May 8 '20 at 17:39
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    Not sure what the little pill was about .. – Lucian May 8 '20 at 19:14
  • You right, but i already tried to did this. I wanted to if it was possible to insert into a paragraph : an other paragraph, or shape, or wateever and apply this on certains characters or word. As we can do in html css with <span> in a paragraph <p> – Google_Dogs May 9 '20 at 9:19
  • That would be more tricky, but i'll try to explain in short. See updated answer. – Lucian May 9 '20 at 13:13

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