The InDesigner

Hi Michael,

Good to see you back posting 🙂 Yes GREP is an incalculable mystery and it’s probably one of the best features introduced to InDesign. The tip is magnificen, as you say, it’s completely undocumented.

There is one thing though, I don’t think that GREP find and replace works if there is a space at the end of the sentence? It might be an idea to run a search to clean up the text first. Something like this:

(.+)\s$

Then run the posted search then I think all would be well 🙂

I have to admit, I didn’t know about the trick that is posted, it is truly wonderful and I’ll never forget it.

Thanks

Interesting… I love using GREP in InDesign and think that a useful InDesign feature would be the ability to run multiple GREP presets on a given document to automate more complex FIND/CHANGE or GREP searches.

Meanwhile, as an Apple/Java script newbie, I was wondering if anyone knew how to accomplish this task and even provide a sample script to run multiple GREP presets on a given document in InDesign.

Eugene —

A simpler GREP expression for finding all trailing spaces at the end of a line is:

\s+$

Just leave the Change to field blank to remove all of those spaces.

Hi Michael, apologies if it appeared I was taking away from the excellent tip. However, when I tested it I discovered it wasn’t working because there were spaces, so just thought I’d point it out for others using the GREP and not getting matches.

And I love simpler greps, it’s been a while since I used GREP and of course I’m starting to forget some it 🙁

It is a fantastic tip, and I’m going to have to find me some work that requires some GREPing, as it’s fantastic stuff to know. I urge anyone to learn it and use it and be comfortable with it.

If the original post didn’t wet your lips then I don’t know what will. 🙂

Bonjour à tous,
Je réponds en français à Michael D au sujet de “I was wondering if anyone knew how to accomplish this task and even provide a sample script to run multiple GREP presets on a given document in InDesign”. Peter Kahrel, dans Grep in InDesign CS3/CS4, p. 42 (oreilly.com) donne la solution pour utiliser plusieurs regex :
app.loadFindChangeQuery (“query_1”, SearchModes.grepSearch);
app.activeDocument.changeGrep();
app.loadFindChangeQuery (“query_2”, SearchModes.grepSearch);
app.activeDocument.changeGrep();
query_1 et query_2 sont les noms de l’expression régulière enregistrée dans le paneau “Rechercher/Remplacer”, onglet “GREP”.
Je vous invite à lire cet indispensable Short cut.
LT

Hi, Peter —

Thanks for the contribution. Also for the record, when I say “undocumented,” I always mean undocumented by Adobe (not in the help files or the User Guide). Their metacharacter table in the online and PDF help make no mention of support for these established GREP conventions, along with a few other important, but missing, gems like the “end of story” metacharacter (\Z), among others.

hmm… the comment I just posted erased the formatting to which I was referring. That’s part of the problem, I guess. It wants to be read as a code and I want it to be searched for as characters!

Perhaps this works? The characters (phrases?} are “” and “” without the spaces in between. In between those two phrases is a word that needs to be formatted.

Eek. Sorry about the confusion.

I really appreciate the information provided on the site. I found a solution to my problems regarding the GREP. Thanks for contributing in my work.

> I noticed your post and just happen to be viewing Adventures in GREP for InDesign CS4 by Mike Witherell. I believe he answers your question in the Useful GREP search examples section, find “quoted words” and change to italic. The following should work:
>Find: (~{)(\u*\l*\s*.*\w*\d*)(~})

Very complicated, why not use posive lookahead/behind?

(?<=”).*?(?=”)

If you want some screen shots, I covered the “find between [whatever] and format it” issue a while back in this post:
http://indesignsecrets.com/findbetween-a-useful-grep-string.php

In my examples I didn’t want to delete any text (like “Name:”), just format part of it, so I left the Change field empty. But of course if you want to remove the label as well, then you’d use the $2 (etc.) method in the Change field.

Anita — This is an easy one, depending on the answer to this question: how do you know which numbers are mobile and which are not if they’re all 8 digits with no spaces at the moment? GREP can easily find and change phone numbers for you, but if you need to treat some differently than others it’s slightly more involved.

Lain —

You don’t need a script to do this. There’s a good way to do it in CS3 (with GREP Find/Change) and a better way to do it in CS4 (with a GREP Style).

The First Step: Create a Ligature-Killing Character Style
Whichever version you’re using, the beginning of the process is the same. Make a character style that has everything else about it shut off or undefined (in other words, every field for Font, Style, Size, etc. should be blank, all checkboxes left in the “neutral” state, and all pull-down menus set to Ignore (or completely blank). The only thing that should be assigned to this character style is that Ligatures should be specifically shut off (as shown below).

The CS3 Method:
In CS3, you can turn off the ligatures using this style with Find/Change, and it can be a Text-based Find/Change. There’s no GREP required for this in CS3. Simply do a case-sensitive search for the letters “fi” together. Leave the Change to field blank and from the Change Format settings, choose the character style created above to be applied to all instances of “fi” in your document (or story, or selection, or whatever range suits your needs). Find the first instance, then click Change All. That will apply the character style that disables ligatures to all instances of a lower-case “fi” pair in your text.

You’ll need to run this Find/Change operation whenever the document’s text is changed, just to be sure that new “fi” pairs haven’t been added to the text that don’t have this character style applied. The same would be true if you created a script to do this, as scripts need to be run each time you want to take advantage of their functionality.

The CS4 Method:
Find/Change is not necessary in CS4. Instead, create a new GREP Style within the paragraph style (or styles) where you want the “fi” ligature turned off. In the GREP Style options, select the character style created in the first step, and put “fi” (without the quotes) in the “To Text” field. The GREP Style eliminates the need to do multiple Find/Change operations, as it continuously scans the paragraph for “fi” combinations and automatically applies the character style to every one it finds.

Hope this helps,

Michael

Anita —

This is a very easy one. You’ve got a pattern of 8 digita per line and you want to divide that into four sets of two digits each.

In the Find What field, the pattern is described as:
(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)

The parentheses around each of the two “any digit” metacharacters marks them as a sub-pattern to be remembered so you can refer back to it in the change part of the query.

Alternately, you can describe the pattern as:
(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})
They’re just two different ways of doing the same thing.

In the Change to field, you recall those four sub-patterns with Found Text metacharacters, referring to each of the four sub-patterns numerically, in the order in which they appear (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th, in this instance). In between each, you add a space (or two spaces, or however much you need).

That Change To pattern is described as:
$1 $2 $3 $4

That puts back each pair of unique numbers found with space between each pair.

Another question…

Norway does not have the same quotationmarks as US. I’m struggling to find out how to do this…
I need to find:
” Any text with in quatationmark”
and turn it into
«found text but with norwegian marks»

This is probably dead easy… But I cant seem to figure it out.
Please help me once again!

Neets

Sorry Michael!
“Cannot find match.” it says!

Per ”Elvis” Granberg (1941-1980) startet sin artistkarriere i musikalen ”South Pacific” i 1954. Hans rockekarriere skjøt for alvor fart i 1958 og han var aktiv fram til 60-tallet.

This is a typical text that we have to change all the quotation marks on…
And it can’t seem to find it… The text is copied from Word.

And I would like it to look like this;
Per «Elvis» Granberg (1941-1980) startet sin artistkarriere i musikalen «South Pacific» i 1954. Hans rockekarriere skjøt for alvor fart i 1958 og han var aktiv fram til 60-tallet.

As you can see, its a s***te job when the customers hit a quotation mark high! I have to change the dictionary to Norwegian: BokmÃ¥l, then the double quotes into «»…Then start the prosess using Find/Grep to change them all in to the left side «, and once more to change every other (right side ») using Find next -> Change -> Find next… Not funny at all…!

Thank you SO much for helping me out!
As you can see, it’s bloody frustrating to work like this… :o)

Anita

Sorry Martin. It still cannot find match…

On the other hand, THIS code seems to find the symbols; (?<=”).*?(?=”)
BUT it cant change it to the ones I want.

Help me please!

Anita

I am looking for something a little different. I have a list that looks like this.

Here’s an example of a correct listing:

CATEGORY NAME 1

Company Name 1
Street Address 1
City, State, Zip 1

Company Name 2
Street Address 2
City, State, Zip 2

Company Name 3
Street Address 3
City, State, Zip 3

CATEGORY NAME 2

Company Name 1
Street Address 1
City, State, Zip 1

Company Name 2
Street Address 2
City, State, Zip 2

Company Name 3
Street Address 3
City, State, Zip 3

and this is how the problem listings showed up:

CATEGORY NAME 1

Company Name 1
Street Address 1
City, State, Zip 1

CATEGORY NAME 1

Company Name 2
Street Address 2
City, State, Zip 2

CATEGORY NAME 1

Company Name 3
Street Address 3
City, State, Zip 3

CATEGORY NAME 2

Company Name 1
Street Address 1
City, State, Zip 1

CATEGORY NAME 2

Company Name 2
Street Address 2
City, State, Zip 2

CATEGORY NAME 2

Company Name 3
Street Address 3
City, State, Zip 3

How do I remove the repeated CATEGORY NAMES after the first initial one?

Thanks, this would be a big help since I believe you can do anything with the right grep that you can do with a similar plug in like IN-DATA. IN-DATA seems to be an overkill for a lot of simple things GREP can do and with the FINDBYLIST script, you can generate everything in one shot. GREP and Find and Change has come a long way.