I’ll take a look at it in the morning. If you want to increase the odds of me figuring something out then send one of the indesign docs to howarddesigns@live.com

Have a good weekend!

If you are using AppleScript then make a copy of your files into a new folder (just in case this doesn’t work as expected) and try this “quick and dirty” script that I just wrote up:

(* select all of the files that you would like to convert *)
tell application “Finder” to set theFiles to selection

repeat with currentFile in theFiles

(* opens each file in the default application – this will be whatever the latest version of InDesign is on your machine *)
tell application “Finder” to open currentFile

tell application “Adobe InDesign CC 2018”
(* repeat/try combo checks to see if the front document is open. As soon as the script can set the active document as a variable this repeat will be exited *)
repeat
try
set myDoc to active document
exit repeat
on error
delay 1
end try
end repeat

(* your preferences here *)
tell document preferences of myDoc
set page height to “48mm”
set page width to “51”
set document bleed top offset to “0”
set document bleed uniform size to true
end tell

(* Save the document in place and close it *)
tell myDoc
save
close
end tell
end tell

end repeat

Hello Ian,

When you include “^” in your expression, you are basically anchoring the expression to a specific point on the front end. Before you added that part to your expression, the GREP was searching more generally and essentially looking for any characters that appear before “:” at any point, anywhere in your text.

Make sense?

Hello Andrew,

I think that things are getting confused because you are referring to the data sets as “tabs” when we are trying to match on literal tab characters to figure out where to format text. Perhaps it would help if I explained what my GREP expression is doing.

Here is the entire expression:
.+.+\K.*?(?=(?!£))

Let’s break it down into it’s different pieces so that we can better understand what is happening. Here is part 1:
.+.+\K

.+ this is the expression for one or more characters (any character is covered by this)

– this is a tab character

.+ one or more characters

tab character

\K Ignores everything matched up until this point

so, at this point, the GREP expression is stating that it should match one or more characters TAB one or more characters TAB and then, with the “\K” we are stating that we do not want to apply any character styling to those matches.

Here is part 2:
.*?

.*? this is the expression for zero or more characters. I used this, rather than the “.+” because doing it this way is “non-greedy” meaning that it will match only what it needs to in order to meet the conditions of our statement. Conversely, “.+” is “greedy” – it will always try to match as much as it possibly can.

Part 3 is where things begin to get tricky:
(?=(?!£))

What we have here is a nested look-around (a negative look-ahead nested within a positive look-ahead). We are essentially saying that we want to look ahead to a tab character () that is not followed by “£”.

Let’s see how all of this matches up to the example that you gave:

View post on imgur.com

While this is certainly possible through GREP, the more simple solution would be to use nested styles. Apply character style x through 2 words.

That being said, this would be the GREP string to use:

^(\<.*?\>){2}

Hey Andrew,

GREP can be a bit frustrating when you first start diving into it but I think it’s great that you’re giving it a go.

The issue with your grep is that you are stating that the style should be applied to the beginning fo the paragraph (^) then one character (.) and then two consecutive tabs (). What I would use for something like this is “\K” which causes the GREP string to ignore everything matched before it.

Here is the GREP string that I used to make this work:
.+.+\K.(?=)

This expression is stating that it should match, but not style, everything before the \K (.+.+)

The first part, (.+.+) says: one or more characters (.+) one tab character () one or more characters (.+) one tab character () IGNORE the matched stuff before here (\K) one character (.) with a positive lookahead to a tab ((?=))

It seems that I answered my own question! The image embedded by simply placing the url in the comment… Cool!