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The May meeting of the Portland InDesign User Group focused on Paragraph & Character Styles, with a considerable portion of the time devoted to Nested Styles and GREP. The purpose of this article is to summarize the information I presented in the meeting.
Key Concepts
3 Paragraph Style Settings Guaranteed to Improve your Typography
Style Order of Operations
What is GREP?
(from wikipedia) Grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p (globally search a regular expression and print).
GREP has been incorporated into InDesign as a powerful means to search for patterns in text. It can be used either in the Find/Change dialog or in a paragraph style, to apply character styles automatically through the use of GREP styles.
GREP Samples
Here is a copy of the example InDD file used in the meeting. It is in IDML format for backward compatibility to CS4.
GREP Samples-ONLINE
It includes examples of the following GREP queries in action:
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GREP Resources
So you want to learn GREP? I’d recommend you start with the excellent interactive GREP Tutor at rorohiko.com. It’s how I learned the basics of GREP. It features a series of easy-to-understand lessons as well as a real-time GREP query testing area.
https://www.rorohiko.com/greptutor/GrepTutor.html#
Then there is this excellent GREP test utility. I use this to troubleshoot and figure out GREP strings that aren’t quite working in InDesign.
http://www.regexr.com
InDesign Secrets has a page listing many resources:
http://indesignsecrets.com/resources/grep
And then there is the InDesign help page listing many GREP codes:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/WSFB3603CC-8D84-48d8-9F77-F3E0644CB0B6a.html#WS1952D538-1335-4b1d-BA5E-FA5A176FDC9Fa Multiple Find/Change Scripts
We also discussed two great free scripts that can run multiple find/changes in your document. Both of these offer a GUI and support GREP as well as regular InDesign find/replace functionality.
XStrings saves find/change or GREP replacements in a text file and allows you to apply them individually or in sequence. It does not use InDesign’s own saved queries, so it’s good for special uses in which you don’t want your list of queries to be stored in your InDesign Find/Change dialog. I used this tool for the Victor Borge Inflationary English example.
DoQueryList allows you to run multiple InDesign saved queries in sequence. If you’ve already saved your queries in InDesign but want to run several succession, this tool works great.
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