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• • October 4, 2011 at 11:32 am #60683
    LisaGal

    Member

    I have many instances of text within square brackets that i need to change to italic (but not the brackets). The text is within a paragraph and never a standalone paragraph. The text can be from 3 words on up in length.

    I have no idea how to grep and it looks like a really time consuming new language. Can anyone give me a starting point? Maybe there is a fantastic website that has a bunch of greps already existing!!

    thanks,

    lisa

  • October 4, 2011 at 1:12 pm #60684
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    But there is such a website! One page, for example, is this: FindBetween: A Useful GREP String

    For your purposes, you need to adjust the example to the following:

    (?<=[).*?(?=])

    and leave the Change To field blank, applying Italics in the Change To format box. This does not address your specification

    The text is within a paragraph and never a standalone paragraph. The text can be from 3 words on up in length.

    — but is that really important? Because that's still possible using GREP, but the expression will go from “Anne-Marie can explain it” to “Jongware'll need to scratch his noodle to make it do exactly that, no more and no less”.

    (Even better: do not apply 'italic' as a font override, as it will give the paragraph the nasty '+' “there is something going on here” mark, but create a Character Style for your italics and apply that instead.)

  • October 5, 2011 at 7:28 am #60691
    LisaGal

    Member

    Wow, this is great! Thank you so much.

    What are some of the grep websites?

  • October 5, 2011 at 7:54 am #60692
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Mine, for example :D But that's not for beginners or faint-of-heart, though, as it focuses on the limits of what's possible.

    There are a few different flavors of GREP, but the differences are quite obscure and you can in general try any 'normal' GREP expression you find anywhere on the web. David gathered a couple of references:

    https://creativepro.com/grep

    and one of the first mentioned is Peter Kahrel's Shortcut, which especially targets GREP-for-InDesign users and has frequently been called “the best you can buy for a tenner”.

  • October 7, 2011 at 3:29 am #60708
    Colin Flashman

    Member

    Cari Jansen has some amazing shownotes from a presentation she did: https://www.indesignusergroup.c&#8230;..s_GREP.pdf

    Michael Murphy (AKA the InDesigner) has a series of shownotes as well which are fab: https://www.indesignusergroup.c&#8230;..murphy.pdf

    these are about as close as “off-the-shelf” solutions which can be easily customised. Jongware mentions Peter Kahrel's O'reilly book and I agree, for ten bucks it's excellent… i can't even buy lunch for that!

  • October 12, 2011 at 9:14 am #60745
    kidpub

    Member

    One great thing about grep in ID is that you don't need to know that much about the syntax. You can construct fairly powerful grep matches using just the menu in the grep find/change dialog.

    Perry

    KidPub Press

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