GREP paragraph style question

Brett Phillips

Tagged: GREP, paragraph styles, styles

This topic has 6 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 2 months, 3 weeks ago by Margherita.

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- April 23, 2019 at 6:40 pm #116253
  
  Brett Phillips
  Member
  
  Hi Grep gurus… I am trying to make a GREP rule in my paragraph style “Babies”.
  
  I want to apply an existing Character style to part of the 3rd paragraph IF the text matches my GREP in the previous 2 paragraphs.
  
  The format I receive from the authors is in the following format:
  BOY
  Photos: 1844-48
  Jimmy Bob O’CONNOR
  …etc
  
  Another different GREP rule will also exist to apply a different style for “GIRL”.
  
  So, the character style “Babies – BOY” will be applied to the name (which bolds and colours it cyan).
  
  That means “BOY” or “GIRL” is important, the next line is not so important, it’s just the Photo reference, then the third paragraph is the important one that needs stylising.
  
  Thanks folks!
- April 24, 2019 at 8:50 am #116255
  
  David Blatner
  Keymaster
  
  I don’t think you can apply a grep style that acts across multiple paragraphs. The GREP style is really focused on patterns within a single paragraph.
  
  However, you could use the GREP tab in the Find/Change dialog box to apply it. For example, you could search for GIRL\r.+\r\K. and apply a paragraph style to it, like this:
  
  This searches for the first character of a paragraph that is 2 paragraphs down from the word “girl” and applies the paragraph style to the whole paragraph.
- April 28, 2019 at 9:42 pm #116282
  
  Brett Phillips
  Member
  
  Thanks for your reply David!
  
  I’m surprised that’s not a feature (yet!). I can imagine a myriad of uses for using a GREP rule in a paragraph style that reacts to multiple paragraphs inside the story (think, Table of Contents, Top 10 list, Q&A and more).
  
  I hope Adobe can add that to the feature list!
  
  So I guess the next question is, can your Find/Replace solution be coded into a script? That might be a working option! No idea where to start on that though. Can you suggest a forum or resource for figuring out how to do it?
  
  Thanks heaps!
- April 29, 2019 at 8:24 am #116284
  
  David Blatner
  Keymaster
  
  You can probably turn this into a script using the FindChangeByList script. See:
  https://creativepro.com/tag/findchangebylist
- May 24, 2019 at 2:44 pm #116855
  
  Jeremy Howard
  Participant
  
  I know I am late to the game on this one but my ears always perk up at the mention of GREP…
  
  Brett, have you considered using line breaks (AKA soft returns)? You can get the results that you are looking for using soft returns rather than paragraph returns with this GREP string:
  
  GIRL\n(.+\n)+\K.+(?=$)
  
  BONUS: This will work with a minimum of 3 lines (separated by soft returns) and there is no maximum number of lines!
  
  See my screenshot for an example:
  
  GREP – Girl/Boy paragraph with soft returns
  
  On a different note, David, How do you post images on these threads?
- May 24, 2019 at 2:45 pm #116856
  
  Jeremy Howard
  Participant
  
  It seems that I answered my own question! The image embedded by simply placing the url in the comment… Cool!
- October 29, 2024 at 4:21 am #14407899
  
  Margherita
  Member
  
  Hi!
  
  I am trying to understand how to apply the same character style to many different paragraph styles
  
  problem: I need to use a bold style on names on body copy, table text, dida exc
  
  I am using the GREP style to insert the list of names divided by a pipeline and the character styles applied to it but this means repeating this on each paragraph style…
  
  I tried to apply the character styles with the list of names on a single paragraph syle named GREP and this is going to be the mother of all the other paragraph, but this is not working…
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