GREP Styles puzzle: apply character style to the first half of every word

[CJ Cramer]

I recently ran across the below text sample, apparently produced by bionic-reading.com. In this sample it's simply a matter of bolding the the first 50% (rounded up) of characters in every word, though the site gives other controls.

Putting aside whether this styling is actually advantageous, is there a way to implement this (bold first 50% of every word) with a GREP style? Where would you begin? 

[Robert Tkaczyk]

I'm not an expert in GREP - but I think you would need to search for each length separately.

Something like this:

1st step to "split" words - where "{2}" determines number of letters in each "half":

Then style upto %:

Then just remove "%" styled Bold.

But I'm sure someone will be able to do it in one or max two steps 😉

Or it could be easily scripted.

[FRIdNGE · Accepted solution]

(^/)  The Jedi

[CJ Cramer]

Brute force! Sure 🙂

[FRIdNGE]

or (asked by op):

(^/)

[CJ Cramer]

Okay, I'll bite: what's ID-Tasker? The only hits I'm finding are your forum sig.

[Robert Tkaczyk]

😉 Tool I'm working on - you'll be able to do EVERYTHING you can do manualy in the InDesign ... so if you have 100s of INDD files that you need to Export as PDFs/JPEGs - or only some pages - or replace one image on the 5th page on the EN layer or style tables or convert some texts into Anchored TFs etc. etc - you'll be able to build Tasks from Rules - but PC only ...

[Krzysztof Filary5C0C]

You can do it e.g. with the script below, for all stories in the active document. The script gives the character style 'bold', so you have to define it beforehand.

var doc = app.activeDocument;
for (var s = 0; s < doc.stories.length; s++){
	for (var w = 0; w < doc.stories[s].words.length; w++){
		for (var c = 0; c < Math.ceil(doc.stories[s].words[w].length/2); c++){
			doc.stories[s].words[w].characters[c].appliedCharacterStyle = 'bold';
			}
		}
	}

Alternatively, for selected text frames, not including overflow text:

var selTextFrames = app.selection;
for (var t = 0; t < selTextFrames.length; t++){
	for (var w = selTextFrames[t].words.length-1; w >=0 ; w--){
		if (selTextFrames[t].words[w].isValid){
			for (var c = 0; c < Math.ceil(selTextFrames[t].words[w].length/2); c++){
				selTextFrames[t].words[w].characters[c].appliedCharacterStyle = 'bold';
				}
			}
		}
	}

[Robert Tkaczyk]

Nice. 

But instead of inside for() to apply CharStyle - you can get the number of chars - from .ceil() - and use itemByRange - I'm not JS guy and replying from my phone so... 

[FRIdNGE]

The "word" javascript syntax remains to me [personal] truly bad!

(^/)