Comments on: 5 Cool Things You Can Do with GREP Styles

By: Higgi

Higgi — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:53:29 +0000

Hey pat4141,
I haven’t tested this but I wondered if you just needed to restrict your query by including a character style (italic) in the Find Format box?

By: pat4141

pat4141 — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:50:58 +0000

Is anybody still reading this? Hope so. I am not a professional, I am merely laying out a small book for my club (Nevada Native Plant Society). Its all laid out (with some prior help from these forums, thankyou very much), but the problem now is: need the scientific names in the photo caption boxes and text to appear italicised in the index. It seems that I have to learn about GREPS and I have been doing so. The most useful text for understanding how to build expressions was Michael Murphy’s GREP in InDesign CS3 which has examples in color with detailed but simple explanation, as well as explanation of overall principles of assembling GREP expressions. The best one for showing how to incorporate it in a paragraph style was Using GREP Styles in InDesign by Jennifer Jones. The abovecomments are to help out other people in my same boat.

The other reason I am writing is to ask you experts: what would the metacharacter be to refer to text that is italicized? Can’t find it anywhere. I found caps but not that.

Then am I right that having the code I need, I need to follow a procedure like that described for subscripts/superscripts and Index Entries and Subscript/Superscript and David Blatner’s Auto Format Superscript and Subscript Numbers using GREP Styles.?

BUT a set of instructions that describes exactly what I want to do would be just ducky! Including where to put what, and how to run the index to reflect the modifications. It would save me countless (unpaid) hours. Can anyone help me with that? All the future users of our little book will thank you………

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:20:19 +0000

I thought that might be the case, but was hoping for an automatic solution. Fortunately, if i need to manually do it there are only a handful of chapters in the 300 page technical book that need it. Thanks for the quick response Jongware! BTW, fantastic info here for the chemical GREP styles. Will save me loads of time.

By: Jongware

Jongware — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:11:09 +0000

Aaron: the issue at hand is that automatically picked up text such as your running header cannot be selectively formatted. Compare it to attempting to format the first digit of a two-digit automatic page number.

There is this plugin called “Power Headers”, which I think does allow selective formatting; I usually just forget the automatic way and do it ye olde style: manually.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:48:50 +0000

I’ve run into an issue with a project where I need to all caps the running headers. With some titles containing registered trademarks.

When pulling data from the paragraph title style (with superscript registered trademarks forced via GREP), the running header style overrides the superscript and makes the registered trademark large again.

I tested to see if turning off the paragraph all caps style would allow the superscript GREP style to work, but it didn’t superscript either. However, if i set the paragraph style to superscript all without all caps on, the entire text superscripted.

Is there a known issue with superscripting individual characters in running headers, or does anyone know of a solution? I’m completely scratching my head on this one. Thanks!

By: collywolly

collywolly — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:23:41 +0000

have a great one for anyone who has to change Mclaren to McLaren and the like:

(?<=\Mc)[\l\u]

to find the lowercase letter which should be uppercase; then

in the style, make sure that the character style is All Caps.

doesn't sound like much, but when faced with a database of thousands using data merge, applying the style to the surname entry corrects the entries on the fly rather than fixing them in the d'base itself.

By: Jerome

Jerome — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 17:27:12 +0000

Forget it guys…
found it!
Thanks anyways.

By: Jerome

Jerome — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 17:13:17 +0000

Hi!

I’m new to GREP concept and I have this small repetitive task I have to perform and I’m sure the GREPs are my solution. Here’s what I have to do…

I need to change this formating:
(enter)
word
(enter)
word

…to this kind of format:
(space)word(space)word

Thank you for helping me!

By: Aimee

Aimee — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:30:59 +0000

First off, let me say that GREP is COMPLETELY foreign to me and I really just don’t understand it. So figuring out if GREP can be used for what I am needing is really confusing.

I have three different block quote Paragraph Styles that I use. We almost always put a space before and after the block quote but not between the paragraphs within the block quote. I have the block quote styles set to automatically add a space before and after so that I do not have to manually do this. Because the before and after space is added with a hard return and when there are multiple paragraphs within a block quote, I do have to manually remove the space. This is very time consuming. I would love to be able to have this space not appear WITHIN my block quote styles and instead only before and after them.

Can I use GREP to solve this?

Thanks in advance for any help! (We are a non-profit organization that publishes books. None of us have any “formal” InDesign training, although we have been using it for years and I just know there are ways to work smarter that we still haven’t figured out!)

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:00:25 +0000

LOL, Theun! Well, we are all guilty of being blind sometimes. No problem.