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• • May 3, 2012 at 11:18 am #62123
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    Hi,

    I use a 2-step GREP find/change to avoid hyphenating compunds (i.e. you don't want to split “greenish-blue water” so it reads “green-ish-blue water”

    Step 1 is to find all text that precedes a hyphen and apply “nobreak” but not to the hyphen – so I find all Word characters and/or apostrophes, with a positive lookahead for a hyphen:

    [w|’]+(?=-)

    Step 2 is to find all text after a hyphen that includes Word characters and/or apostrophe.

    (?<=-)[w|’]+

    This seems to work well enough – but I'm curious if other people do this & if so, how. Is there an easy way to make a wildcard to match all the Word characters and all punctuation except hyphens & dashes?

    This is the kind of thing that I wish would just be a button in Indesign's hyphenation settings . . .

  • May 7, 2012 at 7:28 pm #62147
    BradWalrod

    Participant

    Here are the two GREP styles (applying a “nobreak” character style to both) that I've been using for text paragraphs for a while:

    [lu]+(?=[—–-])

    (?<=[-–—])[lu]+

    (That's a hyphen, en dash, and em dash that it's looking for. I like how you've added the apostrophe, but I wouldn't have gussed that ID would hyphenate before or after one.)

    I suppose that instead of your [w|’] and my [-–—], we could consider [S], which would catch anything that's not a space.

    Brad

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