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Simple GREP help

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    • February 25, 2016 at 1:15 pm #82257
      Brent Hautle
      Member

      I am very frustrated with what should be a very simple GREP problem. I am designing name tag templates which I’ll eventually use a data merge on. Since names can be very short or very long, I wanted to create a GREP style that applies a larger font to the name if it’s more than two and less than 8 characters (which would include hyphenated names and spaces.) I tried this:
      .{2,8}
      But it changes all my text.
      Can someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong?
      Thanks!

    • February 25, 2016 at 1:21 pm #82258
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      The dot means “any character”
      Maybe try \w{2,8}
      (word boundary, word character between 2 and 8 letters, then word boundary)

    • February 25, 2016 at 2:17 pm #82259
      Brent Hautle
      Member

      Hi David, thanks for the reply. I’m sorry to say that didn’t work. I’m trying all kinds of combinations and am not solving this mystery.
      I’ll try and visualize this in case my explanation wasn’t very clear.
      The first names that are more than 8 characters (which include hyphens and spaces) would be the normal paragraph style at 36pt. Eg. Christopher
      The first names between 2 and 8 characters would be 42pt. Eg. Jane
      Sometimes I have a longer name, like Kristina Maria, which needs to stay at the smaller size.
      Thanks!

    • February 25, 2016 at 2:33 pm #82260
      Brent Hautle
      Member

      I just found a workaround! Instead of setting my default paragraph style as the smaller font size, I made it the larger font size. Then my GREP style says any characters repeated more than 8 times will be my smaller font size. It works perfectly. Thanks again for your help.

    • February 25, 2016 at 5:12 pm #82273
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Here’s another way to tackle this: https://colecandoo.com/2012/02/18/square-pegs-now-fit-into-round-holes/

      • February 26, 2016 at 6:40 am #82286
        Brent Hautle
        Member

        That’s absolutely brilliant! Thank you.

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