I put a link and short description of the ChangeCase script on our Plug-ins and Scripts page.

Step 1: GREP Find:
\u.\r

This simple search looks for the last capital letter before the period and the hard return. Most all cap paragraphs would match this.

GREP Replace: with paragraph style for formatting.

Step 2: Run a JavaScript called “ChangeCaseOfSelectedStyle.jsx” written, I think, by Dave Saunders.

This will apply what you want: either SentenceCase or TitleCase.

Step 3: Run a spellchecker to catch the lower-cased proper names and place names.

This is not perfect, but it is agreeably fast!

Mike Witherell in Maryland

Before CS3 and GREP, I wrote a couple of embarrassingly amateur, clunky (but handy) scripts for CS2. One of them applied a character style to tagged text (i.e. text imported from Word, say, rather than official “InDesign tagged text” or XML). It worked by going through every single letter of the alphabet in turn, looking for each letter in a special paragraph style and replacing it with the same letter in a special character style.

If you’re still with me, let us return to the (CS3) present:

If you have a paragraph full of capital letters with a special character style applied to them (thanks to GREP, but hardly my own rather crappy example of it), use a text-replacement script (or use Olav’s excellent sample script with CS3) to replace every single occurrence of ‘A’ in the special character style with ‘a’, ‘B’ with ‘b’, ‘C’ with ‘c’, and so on. That will give you a paragraph with nothing but lower case letters. If you want sentence case, continue by replacing ‘. a’ with ‘. A’, ‘, ‘? a’ with ‘? A’, and so on.

It’s incredibly clunky, I admit, but it can work, and this sort of thing has saved me hours of work.

Hope this helps — Jeremy

Can you expand on the second half of your comment? Next, find and replace each character in that character style…?

Mike

I’ve had some limited success with the following.

First, find all-uppercase paragraphs with this expression:

((\u+\s*)+([,.:;'"!\?]\s*))+

…then apply a special character style to identify each character in them. Next, find and replace each character in that character style with the desired lowercase character (apart from those after a space, if you want sentence case).

Yes, I mean truly that the original keyboarder typed in all uppercase characters.

I see this a lot! And pardon my choice of wording. When I said steered, I didn’t mean to imply anything at all.

Anyway, I read Peter Kahrel’s excellent novella GREP in InDesign, and he, if I recall correctly, mentions that InDesign doesn’t implement this.

Mind you, I’m trying to get my head around it. It could be that I am not understanding Peter Kahrel, GREP, and life in general, but so far, it appears that I can’t do it.

I, too, do the manual Type > Case commands. I managed to create shortcuts to speed it up. I managed to use Quick Apply to speed it up. But, I would like to GREP search it all in one fell swoop, so to speak.

I might add that in the Washington DC federal region, we are handling long document scalability issues a la FrameMaker proportions. That is why this is an important question to me.

Mike Witherell in Maryland

The “Normal” Case — the obscurity of the week — removes any case-related formatting and reverts the text back to how the user entered it.

But I’m guessing you mean how do you Find/Change for “All Uppercase” (true uppercase, user entered the text with the Caps Lock key on) and change it to one of the other Type > Case options.

And the answer is: I dunno. Maybe that’s why I steered the conversation into a different direction. (LOL … I didn’t know I was “steering” anything.)

You’re absolutely right, Mike, that there’s got to be a way … with GREP or with a script or something. I seldom encounter so much all-uppercase text in client-submitted files so I guess I never searched very hard for it. I just manually use the Type > Case commands as needed for discrete text selections.

Maybe Peter Kahrel’s GREP in InDesign book has an answer. I’ll take a look.

After listening to podcast number 70, I find that there is still no answer to the basic question:

How do you Search for entire paragraphs of ALL CAPPED text and convert it all to lowercase, sentencecase, or titlecase?

In many text situations, there are paragraphs occurring throughout text where the writer used ALL CAPS.

An ideal GREP search would find all uppercase words in the entire paragraph; convert to another case; then move on to find the next randomly-occurring paragraph with the same affliction.

I can’t get InDesign CS3 to do it, yet. I noticed David began to comment on that aspect in the podcast (70) and then Anne Marie steered the conversation in a different direction.

This need seems so essential to me, that it leaves me thinking that GREP search would certainly allow for this.

From what I’ve read, other GREP softwares CAN do this, but InDesign cannot.

What are others finding on this?

Mike Witherell in Maryland