Reply To: Apply style to every other/every third paragraph?

David I'll definitely give it a look. I'm currently struggling a little with GREP. In case you check back to this thread, maybe you or jong want to take a crack at this. Actually it's maybe mentioned in your tutorial.

I eventually solved the problem I was having with some imported text, but I still want to know if it's possible to style the first line of every paragraph using grep styles. Specifically I'm just curious if grep (within indesign) can ever work with multiple paragraph breaks as part of a match. Because as far as I can tell, it can't. It only applies to one paragraph at a time. You can't, as a condition, say “style everything that is preceded by 2 paragraph breaks”.

I tried a lot of ways and it seems like grep just stops within the boundaries of a paragraph break. I tried straight rr.+r or rr.+$ to style any line with two paragraph breaks in front of it. I tried a positive lookahead (?= rr).+$ …I tried seeing if I needed to specify the breaks as beginning of paragraphs using ^ rather than r …or maybe beginning then end of paragraphs like so: ^r^r.+$ or just …It simply doesn't match anything. Ever.

I found out about single line vs. multiline and tried enabling single line mode before the expression, it didn't help.

2. Another issue that I'm wondering about… No grep character can match an indesign “text box break” or whatever you'd call it. The natural word wrap that occurs when text hits the edge of the frame and goes to the next frame. Is there a known workaround for this other than manually breaking these lines?

My best solution, which I guess is perfectly ok, is to search and replace all paragraph breaks (r) with forced line breaks (n). Then the following works:

nn.+$

Any time I put a double line break, the next line of text is styled up til the end of line (but of course that's only to a break character, not to indesign's text frame breaking the line).