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• • September 20, 2023 at 7:37 am #14395941
    Andrea

    Member

    I’m working on a huge book layout in Indesign, but the person who entered the text in a Word document many times forgot to close a paragraph with a full stop.

    I’m not experienced in GREP, but I guess there’s a way to identify only the end of paragraphs where the full stop is missing and add it.
    I tried a GREP expression I found in a similar topic, but it doesn’t work for me, I don’t know why because I’m very basic in GREP.

    Can someone suggest the correct way to achieve this? Get ONLY the paragraphs without a full stop at the end.. and add it.

    Thank you so much.
    Andrea

  • September 20, 2023 at 10:25 am #14395960
    Dhafir Photo

    Participant

    Use this, with Change/Find, not with Change All
    in Find: [^.!?:~e]$(?!)
    in Change: $0.

    • September 21, 2023 at 1:25 am #14395971
      Andrea

      Member

      Thank you for answering.

      I tried what you suggested, this add the full stop but does not find only the target paragraphs (with missing full stops). It also finds empty paragraph signs and paragraphs where the full stop exists. (?)

      I think something should be adjusted in the Find string…

    • September 21, 2023 at 3:06 am #14395972
      Steve Davis

      Participant

      I tried this on dummy text and it worked fantastically — with ‘change-all’ as well, I’m curious why you say not to use it.

    • September 21, 2023 at 3:47 am #14395975
      Andrea

      Member

      Hi Steve,

      yes with simple one paragraph style text it works but not so well with a more complicated text (normal, titles, subtitles, bullets)

      – I cannot use Change all because it picks up even the empty paragraphs, adding a dot. (I cleaned up most of them from the original text, but in some cases they need to stay there)
      – A full stop is added even to titles and subtitles.

      If I search step by step using this GREP, it stops to any end of paragraph symbols (including those with full stop), so it’s not very useful as it is, probably something should be changed to work flawlessly in my document.

    • September 21, 2023 at 5:17 am #14395977
      Dhafir Photo

      Participant

      In this case you should say “find every sentence doesn’t end with a dot”. So try this:
      in Find: \u[^.]+?(?=\u)
      in Change: $0.

    • September 22, 2023 at 4:15 am #14396013
      Andrea

      Member

      Thank you so much for your suggestions,

      I tried with the above GREP but it does not work, it finds some portions of sencences within my document in the middle of a paragraph, not even in the end of the sentence… still not what I would need…

  • September 22, 2023 at 7:35 am #14396017
    Michel Allio for FRIdNGE

    Participant

    Basically:

    F: [^.\r]$
    R: $0.

    (^/) The Jedi

  • September 22, 2023 at 7:45 am #14396018
    Michel Allio for FRIdNGE

    Participant

    … You could exclude some paras as Titles searching their style and applying a condition.

    After that, always basically:

    F: [^.\r]$ + no condition
    R: $0.

    (trash the condition after use.)

    (^/)

  • September 23, 2023 at 1:32 pm #14396033
    Peter Kahrel

    Participant

    Did you check whether there are any paragraphs that end in a space (or more spaces even)? If there are any they would trip up the solutions suggested above. To delete any trailing spaces, use this query:

    Find: +$
    Replace with: <leave empty>

    And for sport here’s yet another query to find paragraphs that don’t end in a period and insert a period:

    Find: (?<!\.)$
    Replace with: .

    • September 23, 2023 at 3:06 pm #14396036
      Michel Allio for FRIdNGE

      Participant

      Hi Peter,

      (?<!\.)$ will find empty paras inside text and at the end of a story!

      (^/)

    • September 26, 2023 at 4:33 am #14396053
      Andrea

      Member

      Thank you to all for your suggestions. Many missing full stops have been added correctly through the queries and where it was not working 100% I added them manually (there were not so many left).

      Thank you Peter for your first suggestion, I actually had lots of single empty space before the paragraph symbol, and I believe that’s why nothing else was working.

  • September 23, 2023 at 3:21 pm #14396037
    Peter Kahrel

    Participant

    Bad sport!

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