My first course for Lynda.com—InDesign CS4: Learning GREP—is now live on the Online Training Library. This 3-hour, 45-minute title is the first comprehensive, video-based course to be offered about using GREP specifically in InDesign. Starting with an explanation of what GREP is, and how to write expressions using metacharacters, InDesign CS4: Learning GREP covers both GREP Find/Change (CS3 and CS4), and GREP Styles (CS4) in depth.
Exercises demonstrated in the course include:
- describing figure references in parentheses without styling the parentheses themselves
- cleaning up inconsistent U.S. phone number formatting
- describing every e-mail address in the world with one expression
- simultaneously applying two or more character styles to the same text
- dynamically preventing orphaned words at the end of a paragraph
- converting and reformatting spreadsheet data from Excel to produce directory listings
- inserting anchored objects with Find/Change
- customizing a text cleanup script
Viewing the full course requires a paid Lynda.com account. However, 9 of the movies in the course are available for non-members to preview. For a 24-hour free pass to the Online Training Library, click here.
After six months, tens of thousands of words, and many late nights, I have finally completed my book for Adobe Press, “Adobe InDesign Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts” which is available for 
