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• • January 21, 2011 at 2:45 pm #58456
    jimmykup

    Member

    Hi everyone,

    I was wondering if anyone here is really good with GREP Styles? I have something I want to do, but I'm not 100% positive it's do-able with GREP.

    I'd like to have certain characters within my paragraph set to a specific character style. The characters I want to affect are always the first characters in their line. And I want the modification to end after a colon or hyphen. For example:

    BUNDLED WITH: AMX Inspired Xpress Software

    would become

    BUNDLED WITH: AMX Inspired Xpress Software

    or..

    BUNDLED WITH – AMX Inspired Xpress Software

    would become

    BUNDLED WITH – AMX Inspired Xpress Software

    Is this possible with GREP styles?

  • January 21, 2011 at 4:51 pm #58458
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    You could just use nested styles, which would be easier. When making the nested style, click on the word “Words” (which gives you a popup menu of options, such as Sentences, Characters, etc.). Instead of choosing from the menu, type : – (colon, hyphen) or use em dashes or whatever. The character style will span “up to” or “through” (depending on what you choose) whichever character it comes to first.

    That is, if you type .,! then it'll extend to the first period, comma, or exclamation point.

  • January 21, 2011 at 6:03 pm #58459
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    (FYI, 'cause David's solution is easier ;) ) Using GREP styles, you would use this:

    ^.+?[-:]

    or, if this 'hyphen' is actually an en-dash as in your post, replace – with the GREP code for an en:

    ^.+?[~=:]

    It's quite simple — for a GREP match, that is. ^ is “Start of Paragraph” (and — ugh! — also Start of a line after a soft line break), .+? is “any character, as least as possible (indicated by the question mark; without, it'd be “as often as possible”), and the […] stuff is a list of “one of the characters in this list”. Note: most “special” characters inside an OR-list loose their magic properties — a period or question mark is just that — but a few oddballs have to be escaped to work. If you don't escape the single hyphen, it could be interpreted as a character range instead (as in “a-z”), and you will be wondering forever what you did wrong.

  • January 24, 2011 at 10:46 am #58485
    jimmykup

    Member

    Thanks guys! The nested styles worked perfectly.

  • January 25, 2011 at 1:59 am #58497
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    Just for interest, the difference between a GREP style as described by Jongware and a nested style is the behaviour when the character you've assigned to end the style isn't present in the paragraph. With a nested style, the entire paragraph will appear with the chosen character style, because it styles everything until it reaches the end character – and if it doesn't reach it, it continues styling right up to the end of the paragraph. With a GREP style, nothing in the paragraph will be put into the character style, because the search pattern doesn't match anything. So whether you choose a GREP or a nested style depends on which of these two behaviours you want.

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