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raulgrilo
New Participant
May 13, 2020
Answered

InDesign GREP style improvements

  • May 13, 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 2053 views

I'm a person who really likes the GREP tool in InDesign. When we do a text search, it works almost perfectly. However, in Paragraph Style, GREP Styles need to be improved. There, only expressions are allowed. Details such as searching for a font or character style are not allowed. It seems strange to search for a character style within a paragraph style to switch to another, but I'll give you an example.

Let's imagine a title that is all in bold that contains a word in italic, that is, in practice it is in bold italic. When I set up my automatic summary and search for that paragraph style, I can use another set of fonts and want the bold italic of the title to be light italic. But there is a problem here. The automatic summary will keep the substitution of the word in italic and it will be imported as bold italic, in a text all in light.

I can correct it once, but every time I have the summary of that document updated, I will have to correct an error that would be easily fixed with an advanced GREP Style. Now, imagine if I have a set of formatted documents that every day I have to select specific ones and finish by updating the summaries. That's what I do. So, I recommend that Adobe make this update for the good of all of us.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer David Popham

Recommendations for adding new features belong at the InDesign User Voice site. However, you could reach out to any of the talented scripters on this site to help develop a script solution that would automate your specific workflow needs.

4 replies

W
wideEyedPupil
Inspiring
June 24, 2020

I've also found that the Paragraph style attribute of GREP Style is not always working for me. I have to nudge it to find words all the time by changing the expression to not hit the word then back to hitting the word. Or editting the word in the InDesign document to trigger a hit so the semi-bold italic or highlight rule or whatever is applied. It's certainly not a rock solid feature for me, but it's still pretty usuable, just annoyingly inconsistent at times.

L
Laubender
Community Expert
May 15, 2020

Hi Raul,

yes, and I would support your feature request. Come back here from UserVoice when done and post the link so that one can vote for it. And when we are looking for character styles with GREP styles we could also look deeper into character sytles or other text formatting with GREP Find/Change.

 

Feature request:

Positive and negative lookbehind and lookahead depending on distinct formatting.

E.g.: Find a bold character that is not followed by a bold character.

( Something like that… )

 

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

FRIdNGE
FRIdNGE
Inspiring
May 15, 2020

As all know, Time is relative! …

 

In the immediate, it's not really too hard to play with basic grep styles!

[+ some sets of simplistic scripts to make the game more funny and relevant!]

 

The same text with 2 different para styles applied:

"ParaStyle 1" (in "regular")

"ParaStyle 2" (in "bold")

 

Of course, I don't use here a list of words as misunderstood but tags quickly applied by script just selecting text to [char style]-enrich it!

 

 

(^/)  The Jedi

FRIdNGE
FRIdNGE
Inspiring
May 14, 2020

?

 

Imagine a "Regular" para:

 

"My taylor is rich!"

 

… with "rich" in "Italic"!

 

Most will apply a direct char style to "rich"!

 

But you know you will need to generate a TOC including this para, but, in the TOC, the para style applied will be "Bold" … and of course, "rich" will be in "Bold-Italic"!

 

"My taylor is rich!"

 

So, what will you do? … Of course, you will use a Grep style!  😉

 

… BTW, the manipulation of the Grep styles through their para style parent is not really too hard using Javascript!

 

(^/)  The Jedi

    R
    raulgriloAuthor
    New Participant
    May 15, 2020

    Yes, I would have to add in the GREP Style of the summary this specific word to always be in bold italic, but that escapes the concept of automation, because I have a document template (INDT) that I use as a standard to diagram more than 200 different text, each with summaries of up to 100 or 200 chapters. Imagine I always have to look for words in italics in the title to insert it in the GREP Style and still run the risk of, when synchronizing all documents, losing this configuration? Your tip is useful and, for a specific case, it works. But, in general, I still think that Adobe should improve the GREP style in the sense that I said, allowing to use the character style in the search.

    David Popham
    David PophamCorrect answer
    Participating Frequently
    May 13, 2020

    Recommendations for adding new features belong at the InDesign User Voice site. However, you could reach out to any of the talented scripters on this site to help develop a script solution that would automate your specific workflow needs.

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