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How to shade characters but not spaces

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 13, 2021
7 replies
1428 views

I'd like to create a paragraph style or even character style, if appropriate, where the text characters have a background color, but the spaces are unformatted space. Something like this effect:

I can't figure out how to shade only the non-space characters. I have a GREP style in play that can detect and modify the character style, but I can't figure out how to shade only the non white spaces.

Any help is appreciated!

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Correct answer pixxxelschubser

For example

\S+

character style underlined, thickness > font height with a negative offset

janö58856049

Participant

spaces between sentences
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pixxxelschubser

Community Expert

spaces between sentences
Like

By @janö58856049

???

pixxxelschubser

Community Expert

Glad to hear that.

Just out of curiosity - what's your grep?

In my opinion, there are only two efficient notations for your requirements:

\S+

or

[^\s]+

Both Grep means the same.

Michael J. Hoffman

Author

Community Expert

Right now I'm using simply \w which matches all the "word characters" (letters, digits and underscore, but omits punctuation). This is working well.

I considered \s\w+\s to pick up the spaces surrounding the word characters, but I think that underlining a white space doesn't create a visible underline (have to try that but I believe it will not highlight the white space).

pixxxelschubser

Community Expert

@davecourtemanche

Too bad. I'm afraid I don't get the joke. English is not my native language. And even worse, my English is not the best.

Michael J. Hoffman

Author

Community Expert

I've got it sorted, thanks to @pixxxelschubser 's suggestion. My regular expression is working just fine, the trick for me was to use the underline as the background. Thanks everyone for your help!!

!

pixxxelschubser

Community Expert

Hi @davecourtemanche

a good start. But for any grep style, it's useful to test it with a few examples. Try your own grep on a simple sample text like "my first $100,000.00".

What happens?

And what with \S+

davecourtemanche

Inspiring

But he's doing chord charts. I mean, even jazz doesn't have any million dollar chords. 😄

davecourtemanche

Inspiring

Create a character style with a custom underline. Apply that character style to any letter in the paragraph style.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I think the GREP style is your only option. I don't think ID has any option to exclude style from whitespace. Interesting notion for an option but I think the need is so slight (except for certain types of art/display type) it's not likely to happen.

pixxxelschubser

Correct answer

Community Expert

For example

\S+

character style underlined, thickness > font height with a negative offset

Michael J. Hoffman

Author

Community Expert

For example

\S+

character style underlined, thickness > font height with a negative offset

By @pixxxelschubser

OK, with this, I think I'm on the right track! I knew there had to be a trick to the shading, I didn't think of ultra thick underlines! and with a little extra GREP tweaking, I can pick up a single space before and after the characters so there's a bit of a border.

Thanks!

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