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• • November 4, 2021 at 12:19 pm #14350172
    Richard Lyall

    Member

    Hi folks

    A client has passed me a manuscript where all text to be italicised is enclosed in a pair of $ signs e.g. $italicise me$. This seems like a perfect job for GREP, but I cannot get it working consistently.

    Text between $ signs may include letters, digits, whitespaceewline, punctuation

    Goal is to find each instance, italicise the text, and remove the $ signs.

    My current GREP query is below, but it misses many instances:

    Find: (\$)(.+)(\$)
    Replace: $2 (Change format to “Italic” character style)

    Any help appreciated!

    Thanks
    Richard

  • November 4, 2021 at 12:42 pm #14350177
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Do you see any patterns of what it’s missing? Is it just new lines?
    I would simplify to \$(.+?)\$ and replace with $1

    • November 4, 2021 at 2:03 pm #14350183
      Richard Lyall

      Member

      David

      Of all the GREP query suggestions I’ve had online, yours works the best, missing the fewest hits.

      The one that’s stumped all the suggested GREP queries so far is the passage of text attached at the end of this message. It’s the speaker of an endorsement in a book’s front matter, and a line break separates the speaker’s name from her bio.

      Most of the search hits won’t have any line breaks, so I think I’m OK to pick them up manually.

      Thanks again
      Richard

      ================

      This introduction to St Bernard through the lens of friendship opens up the twelfth-century monastic world of Bernard and of Aelred of Rievaulx and casts light on the struggles and joys of our lives today.
      $Reverend Dr Liz Carmichael MBE
      Emeritus Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford$

  • November 4, 2021 at 1:41 pm #14350179
    Dhafir Photo

    Participant

    Try this:
    in Find: \$([\S]+?)\$
    in Change: $1
    in Change Format: Italic

    • November 4, 2021 at 1:48 pm #14350180
      David Blatner

      Keymaster

      Wow! That’s great, Dhafir. Thank you. So, \S means “anything that isn’t a space” right? But means “any horizontal space”? Makes my head spin!

    • November 5, 2021 at 12:43 am #14350193
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      Hello David!
      Yes that’s right
      \S All characters except Spaces, breaks, separators, right indent tab, and indent to here
      Horizontal whitespace including tab

  • November 4, 2021 at 1:53 pm #14350181
    Richard Lyall

    Member

    Thank you both for getting back to me – I’ll give these a go!

  • November 5, 2021 at 1:07 am #14350194
    Steve Davis

    Participant

    Funnily enough, this last week I was given some text for a book with markings (in Hebrew) like, [Z] ending with [ZZ] denoting a quotation to be indented. I tried to modify the above GREP without success, instead I did a multi find/change to apply my indent.

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