Comments on: Merging Paragraphs with Find/Change

By: Martin Braun

Martin Braun — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:43:18 +0000

Hi Peter,

your solution with paragraph styles ist great and works in CS3 and older Versions. A geeky grep way in this case is the “negative lookahead”. Try this (and be amazed):

Search: ^((?!Interest:).*)\r
Replace: $1\n

Greetings from Germany
Martin

By: Peter Spier

Peter Spier — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:48:42 +0000

Seems to me that using %%%Interest you are going to end up splitting off the interest and adding it to the following name. Perhaps it would be better to find all instances of Interest and apply a new paragraph style name to that paragraph, then find any other style and change the paragraph return to a line break (bear in mind I haven’t tested this).

Peter

By: Lazza

Lazza — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:46:42 +0000

To Andrew Herzog

How to think!

Edward De Bono has written numerous books on how to think.

check it out!

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:48:58 +0000

The thing about “no-brainers” is that they’re only no-brainers to people who forgot they too, at one point, needed to figure it out. Note the category for the post: Beginner’s Corner.

If you only had the word “Interest” to key on, then instead of replacing two returns in a row with the %%%, you’d replace one return followed by the word “Interest” with “%%%Interest”.

By: PaulK

PaulK — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:44:38 +0000

I didn’t notice that the OP specified that each entry set was separated by a double hard return after the Interest: line. Too me the problem’s a bit of a no brainer given the double hard return. What if you only had the word Interest: to key on? Or maybe I’m misreading something here.

By: Five

Five — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:20:28 +0000

I second Peter Kahrel’s e-book. Well worth the $9.99 and then some.

By: Andrew Herzog

Andrew Herzog — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:29:56 +0000

3 step find and change — good
2 step find and change –better
1 step grep –best
1 step grep that fixes my lunch –amazing

I wonder, has anyone written a book that explains problem solving techniques? How to THINK through problems, APPLY what they know, and USE available resources to come up with the most amazing solution?

Not that the book has to be geared toward any particular application or platform, just something that can help people learn to be problem solvers and make the most use of what they have.

I have seen people who can’t even attempt anything similar to this. (They can’t think outside the box.)

And some who spend their time outside the box when what they need is to realize the box has everything they need.

By: Wa Veghel

Wa Veghel — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:56:17 +0000

>or a great GREP resource, don’t forget Peter Kahrel’s wonderful PDF e-book, GREP in InDesign CS3. Well worth the $9.99!

That is the one I meant, see O’reillys

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:25:08 +0000

Well I wondered how long someone would put up a GREP solution that’s faster.

Still, not everyone has CS3 or is in a position to export text to a GREP-ready text processor for this; so the plain old F/C works just as well.

For a great GREP resource, don’t forget Peter Kahrel’s wonderful PDF e-book, GREP in InDesign CS3. Well worth the $9.99! I wrote about it in a blog post a couple months ago.

By: Steve Werner

Steve Werner — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:14:28 +0000

If you have lots of time and no money, Google “GREP.” There are lots of resources, though not oriented to InDesign.

If your time is worth money, it’s worth paying for something well-written.