Auto format a word with GREP Styles, Ignoring Capitalization and Accents

Someone wrote us recently asking about how to format a word with grep styles, but it had to ignore the capitalization and accents that may or may not appear in the word. This is tricky because GREP is very specific; if you search for “Aardvark” it will not find “AArdvark” or “Aàrdvark” or any other variation. But you can tell InDesign to be a little more flexible with some extra and somewhat obscure codes.

For example, let’s say you wanted to format the word NESCAFÉ® — but sometimes it has an accented final letter and sometimes it doesn’t; and sometimes it is just spelled Nescafe. Or perhaps it’s Citroën/Citroen, or Motörhead/MOTORHEAD, and so on.

So here are the two rules to remember:

• You can create a Grep Style (you’ll notice I am quite loose with my capitalization of GREp, too) that ignores capitalization by adding a (?i) at the beginning.
• You can search for any diacritical alternative of a letter by using the code [[=a=]] (but replacing the “a” with the letter you’re looking for)

So in the Nescafe example, you could search for:  (?i)nescaf[[=e=]]~r?

(The tilde-r followed by the question mark means “there could be a registered trademark there, or perhaps not” — in other words, “zero or one ® symbols.”)

That would find Nescafe, Nescafé, NEScafÉ®, NESCAFE®, and so on…

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