GREP styles can be an amazingly powerful tool for automatically formatting text. But they do have their downsides. They can be tricky and confusing to work with, especially if you’re editing text in a document you didn’t create (and/or not a GREP whiz).
And they can be resource intensive since InDesign is constantly looking for the GREP patterns to match and apply formatting wherever the style is used in the document.
So, to get the best of all worlds, it would be great if you could apply the desired character-level formatting automatically at first via GREP styles and then convert it to locally applied character styles.
And that’s exactly what you can do with the help of a new script by Peter Kahrel.
After running the script, your paragraph styles will no longer contain GREP styles. And the character styles that those GREP styles had applied will be applied locally. New character styles will be created and applied in situations where more than one GREP style was affecting a piece of text.
To get more info on how the script works—particularly how it handles the additive nature of GREP styles—and download it, click here.
Thanks, Peter!
This article was last modified on May 29, 2025
This article was first published on May 20, 2025
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