November 25 2007 • 4:50 PM

New Guide for GREP in InDesign CS3

If you’re trying to figure out how to use CS3’s new Find/Change with GREP feature, and have found the online help a bit, um, unhelpful, you’re going to love this.

grepcover.gifPeter Kahrel’s GREP in InDesign CS3 ($9.99 US) just came out from O’Reilly. You can purchase and download the 47-page PDF directly from O’Reilly’s web site by following the link. That’s what I did a couple days ago, and now that I finally understand what a “Look Behind” is, I’ve already saved at least four hours of tedious hunting and pecking production work on a project I’m working on this weekend.

GREP in InDesign CS3 TOC:

  • GREP by Example
  • Basics
  • Wildcards
  • Locations
  • Repeat: Sequences of Characters
  • Referring to Wildcards: Back-Referencing
  • Finding Formatted Text
  • Replacing with Wildcards
  • Splitting Up Complex Expressions
  • Applying Styles with GREP
  • Look Ahead
  • Look Behind You
  • Look Around
  • Advanced Techniques
  • Chaining Expressions
  • Single-line and Multiline Modes
  • Troubleshooting
  • Quick Reference

I wish the book also had a Table of Examples so I could easily copy and paste them into this post! Throughout the book, Peter steps through numerous real-life Find/Change routines to show how the GREP topic under discussion might be used, and I found them just as valuable as the explanatory content.

8 Responses discussing this post. Add yours below.

  1. November 26th, 2007 • 12:48 am • Link

    GREP is one of those great features many will never use. In addition to this awesome new book, you may dig around the BBEdit forums. They’ve had GREP for quite some time…

    -Scrapless Press
    http://scraplesspress.com/blog

  2. Bob Bringhurst
    November 26th, 2007 • 3:36 pm • Link

    The expanded help on the web does include several GREP examples, and the Comments section provides several links to other GREP resources.

    http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/5.0/help.html?content=WS1952D538-1335-4b1d-BA5E-FA5A176FDC9F.html

  3. Eugene
    November 26th, 2007 • 5:18 pm • Link

    Ah GREP, love this feature. Can’t quite part with the $10 just yet. But maybe in the future. I have it doing what I need it to do now, so I can’t see myself getting this just yet, until I need it. It’s great to know it’s out there though.

    Thanks.

  4. November 26th, 2007 • 11:27 pm • Link

    Don’t forget that you can get 35% off this book using the your InDesign User Group discount code. Just go to http://www.indesignusergroup.com and join your nearest chapter and look for member benefits.

  5. June 20th, 2008 • 7:26 am • Link

    gnnggkj

  6. June 19th, 2009 • 6:24 am • Link

    Some time ago I faced the same problem ian it took me several hours to find the solution in the Internet. So Internet really has all the info in the world. The only question is how to find what You need :)

  7. August 17th, 2009 • 7:27 am • Link

    Thanks for that article. It was certainly interesting to read it. I like anything connected to this topic. I hope to read a bit more on that blog soon.

  8. Rhiannon
    August 17th, 2009 • 7:32 am • Link

    Comment spam much?

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