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• • October 21, 2012 at 8:37 pm #63416
    Illustrator88

    Member

    Let's say I have several paragraphs that contain people's names, like a celebrity news column. How would I apply a character style (e.g., bold) to the names only? Would this be a job for GREP? I basically want to look for two capitalized words in a row, such as:

    Singer Mick Jagger said the Rolling Stones had rehearsed around 70 songs for a series of 50th anniversary concerts later this year, and guitarist Keith Richards assured fans the veteran British rockers would “deliver”.

    I don't know GREP beyond what's built into ID, so help me out here. Thanks.

  • October 22, 2012 at 2:42 am #63418
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    What you ask is certainly possible, and in (at least!) two different ways. First, you can use GREP to search for this

    bul+ ul+b

    and manually apply bold (or put “Bold” in the Change To formatting field, and use any of the Change/Change Next/Change All buttons).

    Second, a way faster method, by adding a GREP style to your paragraph style. You can use the same GREP for this; all names will automatically be bolded.

    If you may have three or more names (“David Lee Roth” comes to mind :D), use this GREP:

    bul+( ul+)+b

    There is a possible problem, though. It is right there in your example! “Singer Mick Jagger” — that's three capitalized words in a row, but the “Singer” is not part of a name. If you manually apply your bold, you can always adjust it later on, but when you want to use a GREP style you're pretty much stuck to it. Depending on your text, you could try this

    (?<=.)bul+( ul+)+b

    which will ignore the very first word, even if it starts with a capital. You can even tell GREP to ignore the specific word “Singer”:

    (?!Singer)bul+( ul+)+b

    .. but perhaps you also have a “Singer/songwriter”, a “Musician”, “Guitar Hero”, or “Ex Genesis Drummer and Singer” ..

  • October 22, 2012 at 10:08 am #63423
    Illustrator88

    Member

    Thank you so much – I will give it a try with a paragraph style. I'm wondering if I can apply a character style that I've already created, rather than simple bolding. For example, one with a yellow highlight that I've made with an offset underline.

  • October 22, 2012 at 10:16 am #63424
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    The best all-around guide is Peter Kahrel's O'Reilly Shortcut on GREP for InDesign: https://shop.oreilly.com/produc&#8230;..6156015.do

    But the very short version: b is a word break, u stands for a single uppercase character, l for a single lowercase character. InDesign's GREP even recognizes Greek or Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase characters as such (not that I think Greek names to pop up in your articles — George Michael doesn't count! he's spelled in Latin!)

    The '+' means “one or more of the preceding code”, so something like l+ means “one or more lowercase characters). The parentheses group stuff together in a functional unit; (ul)+ means “find one uppercase, then one or lots of lowercase characters; repeat this unit as much as possible”. As you see, GREP is quite concise compared to English :)

  • October 22, 2012 at 10:26 am #63425
    Illustrator88

    Member

    Thanks again – I have a lot to learn, but I find this stuff very interesting!

  • October 24, 2012 at 9:37 am #63442
    Chuck Nigash

    Member

    Theunis, you make it look so easy.

    Nice thread. And I second the motion on Peter's book. Fantastic recipe for success. ALSO: The title of Peter's book has CS3 & 4 in there…. but GREP for ID hasnt changed and everything is still valid. Best $10 or so you can spend on one of the best guys here too.

  • October 24, 2012 at 10:50 am #63446
    Chuck Nigash

    Member

    Sooooo, Theunis, just for kicks I tried something related to this on for size:

    (?<=.)bu+

    CONTRIBUTORS: ILLUSTRATOR, JONGWARE, NIGASH

    Hoped for change to … CONTRIBUTORS: Illustrator, Jongware, Nigash

    This cleverly skips the category “CONTRIBUTORS:” and selects the names … Now, let's say the names should all be lowercase. It gets sticky. I created a character style based on Normal, but that had no effect.

    I basically tried to change typed caps to lowercase as an extension of this thread. If Adobe's Ch Styles supported lowercase, it'd work. Even more cool would be to look back and hold the first Cap and change the rest of the word to lc, but that'd be magic and probably lean on jsx.

  • October 24, 2012 at 2:58 pm #63447
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Chuck, InDesign's flavor of GREP cannot change uppercase to lowercase. Using a character style, you can change lowercase to uppercase only because “Capitals” is a text attribute — it does not change the actual text, as you can see by copying and pasting it into the Find What field, for example.

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