19 years and 2 months ago it was requested. On Sept 11, 2017 it was put into a future release/backlog production line - 8 years, 9 months, and 2 days... and this is still not implemented.

Mr Agarwal's "in backlog" post was mildly encouraging back in late 2017. But really, sir, what kind of backlog is this? A decade later, is it still in the "backlog"? That, frankly, is very hard to believe. It seems quite probable that this item is dead and removed from the so-called backlog. Or perhaps it's just so far down the list that it will never ever be dealt with. That's certainly the impression we, as users, have of these long-term functionality requirements.

Sadly, it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy -- because the feature is often useless, it is much less seldom used than it would be if it worked. This results in the broken feature being given a low priority. So it doesn't get fixed and therefore doesn't get used and therefore doesn't need to be fixed. In the end, it's ridiculous. As is so often the case, features like this are rarely understood by those who engineer them, since the engineers are unlikely to be professional users of the software.

It's so frustrating and disappointing that Adobe still hasn't addressed or resolved this feature request after ALMOST A DECADE. Please, please, please, please, please enable multi-line text variables!!!

Hoping back on this thread: Y'all, I can't say that I've completely switched to Affinity Products yet, but as a 10+ year user of InDesign, I can say that Publisher Pro 2 (the counterpart to InDesign) is a pretty easy transition now that I've used it for a couple of choice projects. Lots of handy features, including (from what I understand), more flexibility with variables. Plus, it's a one-time fee.

Classic Adobe. Add a super useful feature like variables and then make it totally unusable in a bunch of use cases because of a stupid BUG like this. This is NOT a feature!

Just swinging by to wish a Happy 8th Birthday to this beloved feature request from 2017!

You’ve grown so much over the years... well, not in functionality, obviously, just in votes.

Here’s to another year of patiently waiting in the backlog. 🧁

If captions were set to break, and the frame height to auto-size, we could save a tremendous amount of time applying updates to figure titles and notes. "Mail Merge" gets our publication started, but once there are edits, we have to copy/paste those in place. Very tedious, and prone to error.

this one drives me crazy. I like to show photo "Descriptions" on top of the photo (in a non-printable box) so I have all the information at hand for a potential caption. But the fact it doesn't split the line, or act on the formatting within the "Description" (such as a line break) is really aggravating. Please fix this one ASAP. Thanks.

This is a must! Crazy this has not been added already!

All we really need is for variable text to respect the paragraph style's tracking and hyphenation settings, rather than the current behaviour of variable text forcing negative tracking to unreadable levels.

It's perfectly doable with my tool, unfortunately, Windows only. If anyone is interested - please get in touch.

It's really a shame this is still not done. It makes the feature of variable text -- fundamental to such a huge proportion of documents -- almost completely useless. The request has been extant since long before 2017, but one of the problems with what's now "user voice" is that often multiple requests/needs never get merged, so the demand is not recognized. And here it is, "on the backlog" for almost A DECADE! And now that it's officially in the backlog, a lot of people will just see that notice and not bother to upvote, because it's "being done" any day now. Any year now would be more realistic.

This looks to be an ignored basic function. The use of text variables is ideal for many things, but as I use the Indesign software more and more, I learn how to control aspects, including my future self from missing important revision details. Text variables is how I accomplish some of this. Now I see that a simple document description becomes unreadable when inserted. That's a bit disappointing. This topic is pretty old. I don't have much hope for a fix any time soon.

Honestly, I don't know why this is not a defect. For one type of text to behave so poorly. This is awful behaviour.

We need a solution.

Still in backlog, Adobe? Any acknowledgement of the issue 8 years on would be greatly appreciated by your paying customers.

We really just need to variable text to honour the paragraph style's tracking and hyphenation settings, rather than the current behaviour of variable text forcing negative tracking to illegible extents.

Surely a quick fix? You can call it an AI feature if that helps move this one along.

8 years going strong! C'mon, Adobe.

Long-time InDesign user here, and I'm baffled this isn't a capability in InDesign when similar products like Affinity Publisher 2 offer this functionality (just tried it on my free trial).

Please add this! This would be absolutely wonderful to have seeing as how many people have requested it over the years :]

2024 is almost end Adobe...