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• • October 15, 2010 at 9:13 am #57390
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    How can I find, anywhere on a line, a sequence of characteres in “normal type” followed by a sequence of characters in italics? If this is possible, it would be a very powerful feature.

  • October 15, 2010 at 9:57 am #57393
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I don't think you can search for formatting like that in ID's find/change. But what if you exported the text as InDesign Tagged Text and then searched that txt file?

  • October 15, 2010 at 12:46 pm #57395
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Thanks, this sounds very promising.

    Unfortunately, producing such tagged text files seems to be a very burdensome task: my documents contain hundreds of stories each, so I have to place my cursor in each of these stories and produce a tagged text. Or can I do this with just one click?

  • October 15, 2010 at 3:54 pm #57400
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    At least a partial solution is “look for an italic text that's not preceded by italic text”.

    … (silence) …

    Well, I guess that describes what this GREP does ;)

    (?s)(?<!.).+

    — with “Italics” in the formatting. It'll happily find anything in italics, but you cannot specify the text before it must be “Regular”. It may be anything else, such as “Regular”, but also “Bold”, “Oblique”, or — the bane of many a search-and-replace operation — Adrian Frutiger's dreaded “46 Light Oblique”.

    It also finds italic text right at the start of a story, or right at the start of a table cell or footnote; and that's because, well, in those cases there also is no text in italics before that, is there? No point in arguing with a computer.

  • October 15, 2010 at 4:27 pm #57401
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    (Major “Duh!” … Of course this is totally equal to just finding anything that's “Italics”! … I'm sure I had something else in mind when writing that GREP expression …)

  • October 16, 2010 at 6:54 am #57404
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Thanks.

    I suppose you cannot find, with GREP, “any character in a particular formatting” followed by “some other character in a different formatting”, right?

  • October 16, 2010 at 9:20 am #57405
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    No, because there is only one place where you can put the formatting — so it's All Italic or it's not.

    A Little GREP Gripe describes a similar problem. (Spoiler Warning: The “solution” I proposed was a cheat.)

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