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• • August 23, 2013 at 3:06 pm #65000
    Chris Lane

    Participant

    I have the following GREP to choose the first letter of each word in a selected paragraph, excluding particular words such as of, the, and, etc. The problem is the GREP does not include the first letter of the first word of the paragraph (since it is a positive look behind for a space, followed by any character)-there is no space at the beginning of the paragraph. I also need the GREP to include the first letter of the paragraph regardless of what the word is; even the words I am excluding in the rest of the paragraph. I am close but can’t figure out how to include that first letter. Any help?

    (?<= )[\u](?!(f|he|nd?|o|y|rom|or|s|t|r|hat)?)

  • August 26, 2013 at 10:43 am #65013
    Kimmi Patterson

    Member

    Try this: \<[\u](?!(f|he|nd?|o|y|rom|or|s|t|r|hat)?)

    I replaced the GREP at the beginning looking for a space followed by a character with the GREP location “Beginning of Word”

    Let me know how it goes!
    Kimmi

  • August 28, 2013 at 2:38 am #65067
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Kimmi, very good, you had the same idea I had — except for two small nitpicks that chrisl overlooked :)

    1. I copied chrisl’s question to use as test text, and it starts with the word “I”. Since it doesn’t appear in the list of ignored words, it should be marked — but this GREP always needs at least *two* characters.

    2. It is ignoring *any* first character, when followed by the 2nd to last characters of the To Ignore list. So “?rom” is to check for “from”, but it will also ignore “prom”; “?hat” will ignore “that” but also “chat”, and so on.

    The following uses the same idea, but with these points corrected (I also prefer for word break, for no special reason at all):

    (?!(for|of|the|and))[\u]

    and if capitalized words need skipping as well, add the Case Insensitive switch at the front:

    (?i)(?!(for|of|the|and))[\u]

    Oh, and to check *any* first letter, all it takes is this:

    [\u]

  • August 28, 2013 at 5:42 am #65069
    Kimmi Patterson

    Member

    Wow, very cool! :)

  • August 29, 2013 at 6:11 am #65085
    Chris Lane

    Participant

    I agree–VERY cool. Thanks Kimmi and Jongware, this is exactly what I am looking for.

  • September 9, 2014 at 12:05 pm #70485
    Morgan Crockett

    Member

    Hi,

    I have a similar situation but I’m not sure if it’s possible or not. Any help would be great.

    I’m laying out a book that has little handwritten notes scattered throughout. I have a font that looks good for the lowercase letters, but the caps look foolish. I’m wondering if there’s a way to use GREP to apply a character style to only the capital letters (to use a better font) in a paragraph and then use the other font for the rest of the lowercase text.

    Any ideas?

  • September 9, 2014 at 12:21 pm #70486
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Sure! Just make a GREP style that applies a character style (which changes the font, or whatever) and use the code \u (backslash-u). That means “any uppercase character.”

  • September 9, 2014 at 12:52 pm #70487
    Morgan Crockett

    Member

    Ha ha, that was a little more simple than I thought. Thanks!

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