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Let's say I have a document in which I've defined a document variable as "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". When I print this variable in the document, it overflows the document's borders instead of breaking onto different lines. Is there any way to make it behave properly, like regular text?

Sounds like a bug that should be reported to the redlers.

DRM

wow. this is still the case, five years later. makes document variables totally useless for anybody who has to have a long title, which in academic writing is not that rare.

I can now confirm that this bug is still present in Mellel 4

When will this really annoying problem finally be solved?

I wouldn’t want to see any change in the current behavior of document variables myself. I think it’s more useful than the behavior called for by earlier contributors to this thread. I think it’s a feature, not a bug.

Document variables are best used to automate changes in brief recurrent bits of text -- author(s), short title, date and the like -- things that must fit into restricted bits of space in headers, footers, title pages, etc., bits of space typically shorter than a full line of text. Replace a short author or title with an unexpectedly long one, and you can easily make a planned title page break into two successive pages or render parts of a planned header or footer completely invisible. The current behavior of document variables provides clear visual feedback about such issues by making excess text run into the margin in a conspicuous way, encouraging me to edit the value of the variable down to something more suitable right away. If the text of a document variable broke into separate lines in the usual manner, I’d lose that important feedback, and it might take me much longer to spot and fix formatting issues.

It is true that academic works often have overall titles and chapter titles that run to multiple lines, but style manuals I know of require these to be shortened in order to fit into running heads. It’s these shortened titles that are best handled with document variables.