[Vladan Majerech]

Originally Posted by Elinus

I have a Mail merge document that I need to Add Optical Marks to so that my
automatic letter stuffing machine can tell how many pages there are in each
document. THE OMR can be the underscore character.

We use OMR on even pages (back of the first paper) ... it complicated things enough even when just OMR on 2nd page differs from other OMR's.

Solution was textbox anchored in Headers/Footers with "boxed" alignment positioned to proper place in the main page. There is IF inside the textbox chosing according {PAGE} the corresponding contents.

For the content I have used underlined font with hardspaces for lines and normal spaces/empty for nolines (several paragraphs=lines).

You can made it wider by increasing number of spaces, you can change the distance by changing distance between lines. You can controll the thickness by chosing a font.
I have used
{ IF { PAGE } = 2 "..........
..........
..........
.........." ".........."


.........." } where . is replaced by hard spaces
for our case.

This (with more complicated IF) works for OMR's on odd pages as well when you need more codes than just code for first page and code for other pages (when FirstPage Header/Footer solution would be easier).

For even pages, there is one more trick ... to add following field to end of each section: { IF { MOD ({PAGE},2)=1 "" "!" }, where ! is replaced by page break.