GREP: finding double hyphenated words

You cannot search the hyphen InDesign adds itself. I would suggest a tiny javascript instead. (Beware! Untested! Your Computer May Explode (etc.))

app.findGrepPreferences = null;

app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = “bw+-w+b”;

result = app.activeDocument.findGrep();

if (result.length == 0)

alert (“No More! No More!”);

else

result[0].select();

Then fix them yourself.

—-< Afterthought, 2 seconds later >—

Ahhhh — perhaps it's easier to apply No Break to the individual parts of the word (but not the hyphen!). You would need two GREP styles for that, one for each half:

<w+(?=-w)

and

(?<=w-)w+>

— both should apply a character style containing No Break. You might want to consider checking a maximum length of the word parts. There are not that many ten-letter-each compound words, but surely you would consider hyphenating “representative-elect”, “three-dimensionalness” or “vice-chancellorship”? (14 letters and more before or after the hyphen; just a few random finds in my English word list)

Not claiming to be an expert on (any of) this, and the previous post may be saying the same thing in different words: Having disclaimed that :-) you could use something like BBEdit to grep search hyphenated words and insert the “no break” tags in a text file before importing it in the first place. Also, the InDesignConverter software from editorium.com converts Word docs to tagged text and one of the options is break hyphenated words only at the hyphen. Don't know what your workflow is, but that might be worth a look.

and yeah, I'm getting the math-captchas on every post