The style nodes: Paragraph, character, object, cell, table

Style nodes apply your InDesign styles as part of the merge. They’re how the right look lands on the right content, automatically, for every record.

The style nodes

They mirror InDesign’s style types:

• Paragraph – whole paragraphs: headings, body, captions.
• Character – runs within text: a bold code, a coloured price.
• Object – frames: borders, fills, effects.
• Cell and Table – tables built from your data, like a spec sheet.

Because the styles themselves live in InDesign, a style node just points at one – change the style in InDesign and every merged document follows.

Style, kept separate from content

Style nodes carry style information, not merge data. They feed the style input of a node, so styling and content stay cleanly separate: the value being placed is one thing, the look applied to it is another.

Trigger: apply always, or only when data flows

A style node doesn’t output data, but it has a data input that acts as a trigger. Leave it unconnected and the style is applied always. Connect a data node to it and the style is applied only when data flows through that input – the data itself isn’t placed or used for anything else, it’s purely the trigger. That’s how you make styling conditional: feed the trigger from something that only produces a value when your condition is met, and the style follows along.

Fit text to its frame

Record lengths vary – one product name is short, the next overflows its frame. The text style node can resize the text so it always fits, set from a dropdown with two options:

• Resize content to frame – scales the text up or down so it fills the frame. Define a minimum and a maximum font size to keep the result readable and consistent – for example a 6 pt floor (the technical minimum is 0.1 pt) and an upper limit so short values don’t balloon.
• Resize content to frame – shrink only – only ever scales text down, never up, so long values stay fully visible while short ones keep their set size. You can define a minimum font size here as well (e.g. 6 pt; technical minimum 0.1 pt).

Either way the text is adjusted per record, so every document stays within its frame automatically – no overset text, no manual tweaking.

Next

Handle the gaps and surprises in real data: The Action Nodes