Adam Jury is a graphic designer, a publisher of tabletop games, and a co-owner and founder of Posthuman Studios. He’s also speaking at CreativePro Week 2025, which takes place June 2-6 in Phoenix, with a session on Using GREP in InDesign.
We thought it would be fun to get to know him better with some Q&A.
How can designers get over their aversion to GREP and why is it so awesome when they do?
Your first taste of GREP is like the first time having a new-to-you cuisine. It makes sense to start out with a bit of caution — medium spice, please! — but once you realize how tasty the basic dishes are, you’ll be eager to come back and try everything on the menu to find your favorite.
If you already have a few find-and-replace recipes, converting them to use GREP is a great way to learn the basics. You already know the inputs and desired outputs, so make a test document and experiment with replicating the search queries. I think you’ll quickly find that GREP can be more flexible and powerful than InDesign’s basic search, and “Oh! I bet I can do THIS?” thoughts will begin bouncing through your mind, and from there, more experiments are fast and easy. Mess up? CTRL-Z that mistake away and try again!
Also: GREP didn’t originate with InDesign, and can be used in great text editors like BBEdit to find/replace text in literally any text-based file it can open, whether it’s a CSV that you’re Data Merging into InDesign or a web page that you need to carefully extract some elements from.
Soon you’ll be looking at applications that don’t GREP and shaking your head sadly. Uninstall.
Which GREP expression do you rely on the most and why?
I write a lot of off the cuff queries to move text around in a line/paragraph, so I use multiple group-and-capture sets a lot, splitting a line of text into multiple shorter pieces and then putting them back in a different order.
I’ll be showing off a couple different ways to use this during my session at Creative Pro Week!
Best suggestion or tip for anyone looking to dip their toes into GREP?
Well … it would be awfully nice if you came to Using GREP in InDesign on Wednesday June 4th in sunny Phoenix Arizona — or joined us for the online conference. If you can’t make it, or just want to get started sooner, Peter Kahrel has a fabulous book available via Creative Pro. The PDF is beautiful for searchability, the print version is lovely for being a book that you can highlight and scribble notes in. It’s a clear and concise explainer and reference book. If you’re more info video, Creative Pro-er Erica Gamet has a series of YouTube videos.
I still refer to both Peter’s book and Erica’s resources. You don’t need to keep all of GREP in your head all the time, I promise!
Most unexpected use for GREP that you’ve seen (or done)?
Oh gosh, off the top of my head — I once used a series of GREP searches to add Conditional Text features to an existing document, which allowed me to quickly produce a “summary” version of the file with much of the text hidden, and it was perfectly lossless: I disabled some Conditional Text styles to make the summary, copied the summary to a new document for posterity, and then turned conditional text back on to restore the whole document.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I want everyone to leave my session confident that they can identify a problem that’s GREPable and to work their way into grappling it! Once you have a handle on it (or just a collection of good recipes from other places!) you’ll be saving time that you can spend on more fun/interesting tasks — like figuring out what ELSE you can wrap into a GREP query!
This article was last modified on May 12, 2025
This article was first published on May 12, 2025
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