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• • May 23, 2010 at 6:05 pm #55820
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    The comments in my post about Configurator 2.0 and ID started veering to the topic of a “smart” Title Case function, so I'm redirecting people interested in that to this thread.

    There actually *is* an intelligent Smart Title Case script around, written by Dave Saunders a while ago (2006):
    https://jsid.blogspot.com/2006/…..sited.html

    Or you can include the following GREP Style in your paragraph style for the Title grafs. It finds the first lowercase character of every word and makes it a cap because in the GREP style you specify a Character style that sets the case to All Caps.
    <(?!(a|the|of)>)l

    The words in the pipes are ignored, and you can add more if you want.

    Thoughts?

  • May 24, 2010 at 7:34 am #55821
    KlausNordby

    Member

    Whoa! Yes, of course, GREP to the rescue again! I'm still very much a GREP newbie, hence I didn't think of that myself <kicks self>. I'll also check out the Saunders scripts, so thanks! (I have indeed been kind of scarce around here for a while, due to some travels and other personal stuff — thanks for “missing” me, even if only very, verrrry little! :-) )

  • May 24, 2010 at 7:45 am #55822
    Harbs

    Member

    I don't think you can come up with a GREP to really solve this problem. The problem is: Smart Title Case is not just converting the first letter to caps except for cetain words.

    The first word of a title should always be capitalised — even if it's “A” or “The” etc. There's also words like USA, InDesign, etc.

    FWIW, my Formatting Tools solves all these problems and can convert by style: https://in-tools.com/wordpress/&#8230;..ools-1-0-5

  • May 25, 2010 at 2:16 am #55827
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Don't forget: a GREP style can only change lowercase to uppercase, since that's all that is possible with a character style. So a GREP style cannot convert an uppercase to a lowercase character to 'correct' from “InDesign Is A Rather Good Program” to “InDesign is a Rather Good Program”.

    The same goes for the first word of a title — this would typically already be entered as a capital.

    (Harbs' tool does not have these limitations.)

    That said, A-M's GREP can be adjusted to this to change the first character as well (and it shows where the backslashes go):

    (^s*l)|(<(?!(the|an?|in|to|o[rfn]|for)>)l)

  • May 25, 2010 at 6:34 am #55831
    Phil Frank

    Participant

    So I must be doing something wrong. I've typed myself a few titles, all in lower case, and complete with instances of and, the, and of. I have a nice character style called all caps that sets the case to All Caps. When I use A-M's GREP, all the words in my titles stay all lower case. When I use Jongware's, each word is capitalized. Clearly I am missing something. Any ideas about what that might be?

    Thanks.

  • May 25, 2010 at 7:15 am #55832
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Oops. Gremlins Ate My Backslash! :-(

    (^s*l)|(<(?!(the|an?|in|to|o[rfn]|for)>)l)

    (It was the one right before '>' that went missing … this time.)

    The Ye-Shall-Not-Find-This list is a bit obfuscated because of my shorthand notations:

    an? = 'a', optionally followed by one 'n'

    o[rfn] = 'o', followed by one of 'r', 'f', or 'n'

    After that the word should end (A-M thought of that), which is done by the last > code (End Word). If none of the above applies, the first lowercase character is matched.

    The stuff at the start is “Beginning of line, any amount of whitespace (including zero), then a lowercase character. This ensures the first word is always capitalized — try it with “iPads are expensive toys” … (You'll see ID toggle between lowercase and uppercase while entering this.)

  • May 25, 2010 at 8:29 am #55833
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    The Script is far easier imho, lol.

    But the GREP stuff is pretty awesome.

    I wish that Paragraph styles catered for more cases though, like Title Case or even implemented a Smart Title Case with a list of words in preferences to ignore.

    But all the same, I prefer the script here rather than a Grep Style, imho too much can go wrong with the GREP.

  • May 25, 2010 at 8:33 am #55834
    Phil Frank

    Participant

    Yes, that makes a big difference. I haven't figured out why A-M's doesn't have any effect, but yours is now working as expected.

    Much obliged.

  • May 25, 2010 at 8:53 pm #55837
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    Thank you Jongware!

    It's not really “my” GREP, btw, I picked it up from a forum post somewhere. (not this forum.)

    I like Harb's solution, myself. ;-)

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