Smart Title Case

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! :-) ) 

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/indesign/plugins/formatting-tools/formatting-tools-1-0-5

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)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

bringing this back from the dead….

this is working for me until i add a forced line break before a excluded word (i.e., and)

when I force break and the word i do not want to be capped is the first word on the next line it gets recognized as the first word of a new sentence capitalizing it. is there a remedy?

GREP style : CAPS

\<\w(?=\w{3,}\s)

Change first letter of any word larger than 3 letters

(It is not perfect)

– EDIT you dont want the space at the end

\<\w(?=\w{3,})

I found this post looking for a proper Sentence Case method. Found a post and editing it a bit i got it to work i think.
You make a Character Style CAPS with Caps as Casing of course. Then make a Paragraph Style with a grep using; ^.+~j|[\w-] If you add a + on the end it will take the complete word and make this TITLE Cased. Handy for index or so.

But now i still need a version which takes the first word in a sentence and not per row.

I think i found it i replace +~j to \r, so it look at the paragraph letter??? Seems to work. So now the code is ^.\r|[\w-] this will automatically Sentence Case a Paragraph

would this work?

apply an all cap character style to…

(?<=\p{punctuation} )\l|^\l

it looks for any punctuation followed by a space then caps the next letter, then it caps all first letters of a paragraph

this will work for a multi sentenced paragraph.

After double checking yours works better and exaclty what i needed. My version some still did soft returns as regular returns

Just tried the original Smart Title Case script, but it doesn’t seem to be working with CC2017. Is there an updated version around?