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• • August 15, 2011 at 10:24 am #60278
    SteveD

    Member

    It appears that once a character style is applied manually another character style cannot be applied with a GREP style. Or at least I haven't found a way to do it if it is even possible to do.

    I am working on a TOC that is created from paragraph styles and some of the heads in the document have had character styles applied to them. I didn't build the original document or I might have come up with a different way to build it. When the TOC style is applied the original character styles in the heads come over and in order to get the TOC styles looking correctly I have to manually apply none to them.

    Is it possible to override those originally applied character styles using a GREP style?

    I'm fairly new to InDesign and regular expressions.

  • August 15, 2011 at 1:59 pm #60282
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Manually applied character styles trump everything automated, even GREP styles. (Manual formatting trumps a character style again — that'll always win out.)

    GREP styles do have a unique property, though: they get applied over existing character styles, and do not “wipe out” the ones that already are there. Perhaps that's your mistake: if you need to 'cancel out' a style, you need to actually set the reverse in a new character style and apply that on top of the exsiting one. For instance, if you apply “Underline” with a GREP style, it's not enough to draw over it with a GREP style, you need to explicitly set “Underline: Off” in that new one.

  • August 15, 2011 at 6:47 pm #60284
    SteveD

    Member

    Thanks for confirming what I had suspected. I can see where manually applied character styles will trump anything else but I would have thought that the TOC feature would simply pick up the text of the head with out any formating and then apply a TOC style. And it does that for any of the text that doesn't have any character styles applied to it.

    It is too bad you can't set the character style to None with a GREP style to start off with then apply another style.

    Thanks for the reply. I'm going to have to find some kind of work around or get the designers to start designing smarter. :-)

  • October 15, 2012 at 6:57 pm #63363
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi,

    I'm having trouble manually overriding a GREP style.

    The GREP is set to bold and bump up the point size of the first word – only if it is the word 'Includes' or 'Save'.

    the org point size is 7pt for the rest of the body copy and 8pt/bold for the words 'Includes' or 'Save'.

    If i manually change it to 6pt or 9pt etc.. it will manually override, but if i change it to 7pt (same as the rest of the copy set as the paragraph style) it won't change. it automatically bounces back to 8pt (GREP style).

    Anyway arond this? i also need to apply this same manual override to other characters such as 'x' – manually over riding to make it a uppercase X if need be.

    Thanks.

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