Find/Replace manually typed Numbered lists with Paragraph Styled Lists

@Jenn-OMI 

Here are a few screenshots and short info how your work can look like:

1) text contents of a selected Story - of course, you can load ALL stories / texts from your document:

Marked in RED - few paragraps that have some kind of numbers at the beginning.

You can use up/down arrows to navigate through the document - and my tool will automatically highlight corresponding text in InDesign - in order to not make screen "jumpy" - you can use Ctrl/Shift/Alt and their combos to: zoom 100%, zoom on spread, zoom in/out:

As you can see - all texts are "reduced" to only few characters per line - so on this screen alone you can see few pages of text - It's not my document so I'm not showing more - but you can make column CONTENTS much wider to see more text.

Now, here is the best part 😉

You can SORT by column Contents - to get something like this - all "relevant" paragraphs together - so no need to jump all over the place:

For Romans / letters filtering would need few extra steps - or you could use GREPs I've provided.

For numbers - it could look like this - effect of the first Task:

Only paragraphs that meet our criteria are loaded.

And after applying "Level 1" ParaStyle - effect of the second Task - marked in green:

(yes, texts shifted - but it's just a sample with a lot of local overrides, numbers are in black because they already had CharStyle applied)

And after executing again 1st Task:

You can see that "Level 1" ParaStyle is applied.

Some functionality isn't "directly" available in the free version - user is unable to execute second Task in BatchMode - process all Selected & Visible results in bulk automatically.

But it can be "simulated"  - user can assign keyboard shortcut to the 2nd Task and execute it using this keyboard shortcut when moving through the list - so no mouse needed 🙂 in Paid version, IDT can also monitory keyboard globally - running in the background - so you could be going through the text in InDesign and still execute Task(s), without the need to switch to IDT.

Yes, a bit slower - but completely free - and still way faster then what you've planned on doing... 

This "simulated" mode - even if used in the paid version - has one BIG advantage - you can see text you want to style - and decide based on what you see and in context - way more convenient than doing Find Next -> Change in F/C.

Then, if you create more versions of the 2nd Task - with different ParaStyles to be applied and different keyboard shorcuts... I hope you get what I mean 😉

And that's just a small part / most basic functionality - that IDT can do ... same can be done with Cells / Tables and Objects ...

RT pretty much covered the basics. Everything here is going to be dependent on how "regular" the number formatting is. If it's absolutely regular in how each numbered paragraph starts, you could use simple GREP to fix it all in less than an hour, and that's doing it with manual steps so that you don't accidentally format some other outlier text with the numbered formatting.

(As long as you're good about working with copy files, and saving before each major step, you can always try just "Change All" — but you then have to follow up with careful page by page proofing to catch any misfires. I'd find it easier to "Change and Find" all the way through once you've got a working search string.)

If the formatting varies and sometimes you have tabs and sometimes spaces and sometimes a . and sometimes a ) and so forth... at best, you will have to re/write the GREP search to accommodate each variation. But yes, ID can handle this, and a lot more easily than any manual search and fix.

Can you share a sample file?

Please click my nickname if there is anything confidential or you prefer to share privately.

Using GREP:

Find what:

- for numbers - "^\d+ "

- for letters - "^\u+ " or "^[A-Z]+ " for paragraphs starting with Uppercases (*)

- for letters - "^\l+ " or "^[a-z]+ " for paragraphs starting with Lowercases (*)

- for Roman numerals - "^[IVXMLC]+ " - the only problem you'll have with "I " 😉

Change to - in all case would be blank with desired ParaStyle to be applied.

The best would be if you'll have something "extra" after letters - like "." or ")" - then it could be made foolproof.

(*) both can get you a lot of false-positives.

If you work on Windows - I can give you access to the ful version of my ID-Tasker tool for some time for free.

If you'll find reliable patterns - you can process whole server of files automatically. 

Or you can process your files anyway - but create report of all changes - and just check those changes if they are OK or not.

There are many ways to skin proverbial cat using my IDT 😉