How to apply Paragraph Style to text lines of all caps?

[Ted27844426fne8]

I have a book of catalog entries, where the entrys' title is in all caps (not styled, manually done this way). I want to assign a paragraph style to these all-cap lines -- but there are 300+ of these (long catalog-style book) Should I use find-replace or is this a GREP kind of voodoo?

[m1b · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ted27844426fne8, I think you can use:

^[^a-z]+$

It finds any whole paragraph that has more than one character, and no a-z (lowercase) characters.

- Mark

 

[Barb Binder]

Much better than my feeble attempt. Use this one, @Ted27844426fne8!

~Barb

[m1b]

Haha, thank you Barb. When it comes to grep, it is only a matter of time before someone posts a solution that makes mine look feeble too! I am used to it! 🙂 Still nice to have so much help on hand, so quickly!

[Barb Binder]

😂

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Did you not apply a distinct style to these titles? Or are they only some entries among others that are not all-caps?

There are probably Find-Replace methods, but it would probably be almost as fast to simply go through and properly apply a style to these paragraphs.

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Ted27844426fne8:

Are there other all-uppercase strings in this document beside the heads? If not, this would find 2 or more uppercase letters at the beginning of a paragraph and assign the paragraph style. If there are other uppercase strings, don't change all!

^\u\u+

~Barb

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

As an aside, All Caps is formatting based (via manually, a character style, or a paragraph style), Uppercase is typed in that way (by holding down the shift or pressing caps lock key).

The opposite of uppercase is lowercase, which refers to the typesetting cases that held the letters back in the day when pages were created one letter at a time (and in reverse!). The capital letters were in the uppercase, the minuscule letters were in the lowercase. (The opposite of capital letters is minuscule letters.)

[m1b]

Thanks David. By the way, I think your autocorrect doesn't want you to type "capital". Or apologies if it was deliberate and my spelling is too parochial—it wouldn't be the first time I've made that mistake. 🙂

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Thanks for the catch. Been watching too much politics on C-Span lately!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's okay. I lived for years in Sacramento, which has a deeply ingrained inability to distinguish the two forms despite it being integral to most things there. 😛

[Barb Binder]

I grew up in DC, which is the only reason I can differentiate between them. 

~Barb

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Sac has this maddening tendency to choose the word (vowel) sort of randomly for place and business names and the like. (I blame illiterate designers. 🙂 ) But things like news reports bannered "from the State Capital" or "the Capitol City Freeway" are endemic.