Not sure why you want or need a space in an empty cell. If it's empty and wrapped in quotes it should just read "" when you open it in a text editor. 

Maybe I'm missing something. 

Quote from: DigiCorn on February 04, 2024, 07:30:39 PMis there a quote delimited csv option to write a file to? Otherwise, I echo the earlier post that says to do a search and replace with nothing

I don't believe so. 

I don't think the problem is spaces in empty cells. I think his problem is he needs to supply a csv to the other vendor where every cell is wrapped in quotes, whether it has data or is null. 

BTW, TextWrangler used to be the free version of BBEdit. Now it's just BBEdit but if you want all the features you have to pay. The free version is plenty powerful for our needs. I'm not writing code. The GREP search and replace abilities are great. 

Who or what is telling you that you need every cell wrapped in quotes?

I'm used to seeing it that way because at my old shop most of the data came out of Redpoint that way, but none of the VDP software I've ever used requires it. 

To prevent changing the good commas you could save as tab-delimited and in BBEdit search for \t and replace with quote-comma-quote

So you need to put the quotes in? Try BBEdit. You can search for comma and replace with quote-comma-quote and it should get most of them. Won't get the first and last of each line so you can search for comma-\r and add them that way.

Feel free to give me the list and I can do it if you hit trouble.

There may be instances where you cause damage, like if there is a comma in the data. There are probably ways to handle that too.

I don't miss using FusionPro at all, just saying it's a lot of biliary for the price compared to alternatives. It used to be even cheaper but I think they moved to a subscription model nowadays. 

You're right about the data, though - bad data is bad data. You just might have more options with rules and such to deal with bad data than you currently have. 

When I first started doing VDP over 15 years ago, I hated it. But as I've done more and more of it I really came to enjoy it. It helps immensely if you have a decent software for it. My last job about half of what I did was variable. Some was very complex and while sometimes it can be frustrating it's just cool when you figure out how to do something tricky. 

FusionPro would be something to look at. It's probably the best bang for the buck and is extremely powerful, but downside is the interface kinda sucks and you have to work in the PDF. 

I'm using XMPie currently. Still learning how to do some things but it is very tightly integrated with InDesign. 

I can't even get the pages on the sheet!

I can't make the pages in Signa reflect the numbers in my screenshot. The screenshot is the layout I want. 

Quote from: Possum on January 24, 2024, 02:04:03 PMI have had to spend over four hours on a tee shirt design, first trying to get it so that it could be delineated in Illustrator, then cutting it down from six colors to three because they didn't want to pay for six.

And then they send a new file.  

True, or I could simply assign them to the correct position rather than reorder them. I would like to be able to do it the right way, though. I'm not a huge fan of workarounds as a long term solution. 

Yes, but I don't know if I'm forced to or not. Preps could use them but only if you wanted to. 

I agree with you that the customer should supply the data however you need it. Because if you alter the data and something goes wrong and isn't caught til after it prints (and mails!), then you're on the hook. I certainly wouldn't mess with that many records!

The issue is just getting the numbers to land in the right place. 

I found a way around it by making them spreads, then I'm only dealing with 4 different 11x8.5 pages and I have an existing layout for that. 

I used Preps for 25 years so I'm used to being able to easily renumber pages and I don't think Signa works that way.