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• • June 6, 2014 at 7:25 am #68841
    Daniel Ferens

    Member

    Hi Guys and Gals,

    I’m working on a 600+ page catalog and I’m having a dilemma. The font we’re using for the catalog only contains 3 fractions (1/2, 1/4 and 3/4) and unfortunately at this point we’re not looking to change the font either. In order to resolve this issue in the past the designers have done a find and replace for all the unformatted numbers and they simply replaced them with a fraction from another font that contains the glyphs we’re missing. I wanted to know if this could be done automatically using GREP? If you have any other suggestions please let me know.

    Cheers,

    Daniel

  • June 6, 2014 at 8:51 am #68845
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    You’re saying that this font definitely does not have those fractions? Have you looked through the font carefully in the Glyphs panel? Sometimes fonts have simple fractions like this that you wouldn’t expect.

    But yes, you can definitely search for things that look like fractions and replace them with other things with grep.

  • June 6, 2014 at 9:17 am #68846
    Daniel Ferens

    Member

    Thanks for the input David.
    The only fractions that font contains are 1/2, 1/4, 3/4.
    Sadly we need 5/8 1/8 3/8 etc.. It looks like I may have to play around with GREP in order to fix the problem.

  • June 6, 2014 at 11:08 am #68849
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    You can find a simple fraction in GREP by searching for \d\d (crazy looking, I know)

  • June 9, 2014 at 7:08 am #68891
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    I’m not sure how you’d do the replace part, though. You can’t apply more than one type of formatting to the found set. Maybe first do the numerator and then search again and format the denominator?

    But if I were you, I’d just invest the $75 for a copy of Dan Rodney’s Proper Fraction Pro, which can do the Find/Replace for you. (The free version only does on-the-fly formatting, as you type.) It’s a fantastic plug-in.

    https://www.danrodney.com/scripts/properfraction.html

    • June 10, 2014 at 4:21 pm #68919
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      @Marie:

      As you said–the replace part would be a pain if using wildcards. But if you searched for them individually, it could be done.

      For example: Search for 3/8. You find the first one and format as you like it. Then copy. Then in your replace field you select copy from pastboard, formatted (or something like that). And then replace all.

      Then repeat the process for the others.

      I agree that the Proper Fractions script is great. I have the free (limited version), so I do the pastboard thing for searching and replacing.

      I really think InDesign should have some sort of fraction ability. Quark had it way back in Quark 4 (it not earlier), by using a free plug-in called Type Tricks (which they later bought). While one can’t search and replace using it (that I know of as I haven’t used Quark in years), at least one had the ability to make a simple fraction if a real fraction was not available.

  • June 9, 2014 at 7:27 am #68894
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    very very nice! David and AM :))

  • June 10, 2014 at 12:24 am #68901
    Rivkah Lewis

    Member

    I just downloaded the free script and then made a keyboard shortcut for it.
    Thanks – that’s a real time saver.

  • June 10, 2014 at 7:50 am #68914
    Daniel Ferens

    Member

    After playing around with a bunch of grep commands I managed to get it to work. The only issue with this solution is that the numbers in my “fractions” are not tracked together closely enough. I could fix this problem by making a new paragraph style specifically for my fractions, but I’m not sure if it will be necessary.

    I ended up making character styles for the numerator, denominator and one to remove the space between my number and the fraction.
    Below are the GREP commands and character style settings I used.

    Numerator: \d+(?=\d)
    Horizontal Scale 85%
    Vertical Scale: %75
    Baseline Shift: 1.8 pt

    Denominator: (?<=)\d+
    Horizontal Scale 85%
    Vertical Scale: %75
    Baseline Shift: 0

    I used the following GREP style to remove any spaces between the number and the fraction
    Disappear: (?<=\d) (?=\d+/\d+)
    Size: 1pt
    Horizontal Scale:
    Character Color: None

  • June 11, 2014 at 8:51 am #68941
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Can you try adding a little tracking to your Numerator and Denominator character styles, let’s say -20

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