Getting Started with GREP Styles in InDesign

InDesign’s Paragraph Styles feature is the perfect tool for styling text, and the Nested Styles pane inside the Edit Paragraph Styles dialog box makes it easy to apply different character styles to specific locations inside a paragraph. But Nested Styles are limited in their ability to format text because they only look for sequential patterns of text. For example, a nested style can apply a character style to “the first five words,” or “up to and including the first punctuation,” or “up to a tab.” Nested styles fall flat when you want to apply formatting to characters that may appear anywhere in the paragraph.

Fortunately, InDesign provides a terrific alternative, called GREP Styles, which offers a far more powerful environment in which to style precise and definable patterns of characters. And yet despite their power, GREP styles represent one of the most underused features of InDesign. This is, to a large extent, because GREP is so impenetrable at first glance. (Read: it scares people off!) In this article I’m going to step you through the process of making a GREP style, and I think that you’ll see it’s not nearly as painful as you might expect, and that most of you will find it worth the ride.

Below you’ll see the text we’re going to use. We want to make every instance of the key words image, text, and design be bold. In addition, let’s make this more visually interesting by changing those small bullets to much larger ones and setting all the superscript numbers in red. It should be straightforward enough, but as we’ll see, there are potential pitfalls along the way.

First, we need to define and apply a Paragraph Style for the text, assuming it doesn’t already have one. Then, in the Paragraph Style Options dialog box, click on GREP Style on the left, and then click the New GREP Style button at the bottom. The first word we want in bold is the word images, so click in the To Text field and type the word in here. So far, we’ll see no changes; we haven’t told it what style to apply yet.

So rather than choosing a specific font, we just choose Bold as the weight. This will apply the bold version of whichever font is currently in use.

Here’s how the text looks now. In response to our directive, the word images is duly bolded. But, further down the text, the word image—in its singular version—is still unabashedly “roman.” How can we make that bold as well? We need to enable the GREP style to cope with variations of the key word.

Let’s remove the plural, so the word searched for is image rather than images. The @ symbol that appears at the end of the To Text field is actually a nested menu. We can navigate through this to the Wildcards submenu, and choose Any Character. As with all GREP commands, this is replaced in the instruction by a shortcut-in this case, it’s a full stop. So the command now looks like this: To Text: image.

This is how the text now looks: both the words image and images have been made bold, since the wildcard allowed the GREP command to look forward one character. But there’s another problem: the word imagery is only partly highlighted. We need to define a GREP that will cope with a variable number of characters.

We can tell the GREP system to look for a variable number of characters after the word image by adding a code to specify that. This takes the form of the minimum and maximum number of characters placed within curly brackets. So the code now looks like this: To Text: image.{0,2} But as we can see, this produces a problem. While image, images, and imagery have now all been set in bold, the i after the word image is also bold.

To Text: image\w{0,2} Now, the three words are set correctly.

One GREP style can be applied to several different words; they’re separated by a vertical bar I with no space on either side. So to add the word text to the definition, the code reads like this: To Text: image\w{0,2}|text As we can see, though, the word context has also been picked up, with the text component set in bold. So back we go to the Style definition.

In order to prevent InDesign from finding text when it’s in the middle of a word, we can tell it to apply the style only when text is the beginning of the word. We can do this by choosing Location > Beginning of Word, which abbreviates to the shortcut \>. Note that this shortcut must be placed before the word, rather than after it: To Text: image\w{0,2}|\<text The word is now correctly formatted, and context is left alone.

We can add the word design to the list, using the I character to separate it from the other words. This is how the code will read: To Text: image\w{0,2}|\<text|design A couple of problems appear. The word designer has been partially highlighted, and the second appearance of the word, after the bullet point, has been omitted, because it begins with a capital letter.

To make the capital letter appear, we can choose Modifiers > Case Insensitive On, which places the code (?) before the word in question: To Text: image\w{0,2}|\<text|(?i)design Now, though, while Design has been picked up correctly, so has InDesign. D’OH! That’s the next thing to fix.

We can tell InDesign to pick up the word design only when it’s both the start and the finish of the word by choosing these options from the Location submenu. We can also type the codes in manually by placing \< before the word and \> after it: To Text: image\w{0,2}|\<text|\<(?i)design\> Now, all the words are set correctly.

In this piece of text, three words are linked to footnotes by superscript numbers. To make them stand out, we can set them in red. To do this, we’ll need to create a new GREP style, using the button at the bottom of the panel. In the To Text field, we can choose Wildcards > Any Digit, which will use the shortcut \d: To Text: \d All we need to do next is to define a Character Style for the footnote, and it will be picked out in red.

But while we can define a new Character Style that sets the letter in Zapf Dingbats, obviously this would set every l in the document in that style, which would look ridiculous. One thing you can’t do with GREP styles is to tell them to change one character for another. (Anyone out there want to write a script?)

Now, every l is left alone, and only the characters lz are changed to Zapf Dingbats. The question now is, how can we stop that z from showing up as a rectangular gray block?

We can’t tell InDesign to ignore a character altogether, but we can define a Character Style that’s invisible. First, make a new Character Style, and set the Character Color to None. That’s a good start, but the character still takes up space, even if it’s invisible. So in the Advanced Character Formats pane, set the Horizontal Scale to its minimum value of 1%. Now, the character will take up virtually no space.

Well, not quite. Did you spot the error? Look at the last line of text: it reads “be lay with your text settings.” The letter z has disappeared from lazy, and that’s not an error that your spell-checker will catch.

We can fix this by telling InDesign to apply the Hidden style only when the letter z is preceded by the letter I. To do this, choose Match > Positive Lookbehind from the pop-up @ menu. The code for this is (? <=), and it needs to be placed before the letter to which it applies. Since the letter we want to look out for is l, we must type that after the = sign: To Text: (?<=l)z Now, the entire text is formatted correctly, with large chunky bullets.