Indesign: NOT deleting blank lines?!?!

[Wortman_Printing]

Remove Blank Lines For Empty Fields

Remove paragraph returns inserted for empty fields. This is especially useful for mailings in which you have an optional address field. This option ignores soft returns. If any characters, including spaces, appear on the line, the line is not deleted.

I am finding, however, that even though the empty fields are indeed empty and this option is selected, the Data Merge is leaving behind a paragraph return. I am using Adobe Indesign CC 2017.

Example:

<<Name>>¶

<<Address_1>>¶

<<Address_2>>¶

<<Address_3>>¶

<<City>>, <<State>> <<ZIP>>

Becomes

John Doe¶

123 Main Street¶

¶

Hometown, IL 60456

Since Address fields 2 and 3 were blank in the CSV source (ex: 123 Main Street,,,Hometown,IL,60456), I would expect the "Remove Blank Lines" to remove BOTH blank lines... but only one is removed.

Can anyone provide any advise on how to make this function as the help apparently claims it will?

[vinny38]

Hi,

Well it does work... hmmm ok... let's say it should work!

Could you supply more information, including workflow (i.e. do you use export from excel?), screenshots (i.e.: merged document with special characters:

Does the issue also occur while merging from a .txt (separator: tab)?

[mikem18836057 · Accepted solution]

I know this is old but I was running into this issue as well today and what worked for me may not work for you but it might help someone in the future. On the Create Merged Document window, I checked the Record Limit  per Document [ 50 ] box, changed the number from 50 to the amount of records in the .csv (comma seperated value) file and the empty fields for the 2nd address line were no longer paragraph returns. As I said I'm sure this is not going to help everyone but it might help someone.