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March 29, 2022 at 1:44 pm in reply to: Possible to find unstyled character(s) touching styled characters on either/both sides? #14362147
Olaf Nelson
MemberThat hadn’t occurred to me. Even if I don’t need them anymore, I wish I’d taken a screenshot back when they worked. Maybe if I opened all the old version of ID on my old computers I’d find the saved queries.
March 29, 2022 at 9:29 am in reply to: Possible to find unstyled character(s) touching styled characters on either/both sides? #14362063MemberI just posted this as a comment (https://creativepro.com/how-to-find-and-fix-partially-italic-words-with-grep/#comments/2417197) on Mike Rankin’s post about fixing partially italicized words (https://creativepro.com/how-to-find-and-fix-partially-italic-words-with-grep/) but thought I should add it here so it has a better chance of helping someone else and of being seen by someone who has the GREP expertise to make my simple queries more powerful, flexible, or efficient.
I took Mike’s queries and, with very little experimentation, found preliminary solutions to this problem I’ve wanted to solve since I started using InDesign (either ID 2.0 or CS, 2003-ish, when I’d never heard of GREP and don’t even know if ID had it). As I mentioned above in this thread, Jongware’s expressions no longer work for me.
I’m sure these can be made more powerful or more efficient, but I’m ecstatic at the results I got from 5 minutes of effort.
For the parentheses issue I searched for [\S]+ (Mike’s search) but altered the Change To field to put non-joiners both before AND after the italics: ~j$0~j.
Then I did a find query that looks for ( followed by a non-joiner OR a non-joiner followed by ) and changes it to italics: ((\()(~j)|(~j)(\)))I’d love to be able to have it look for (~j, check to see whether the closing ) is preceded by ~j, and change them both ONLY if both are matches (change nothing if only one matches). Possible? (Would also be useful for quotation marks around italic text, but would have to account for punctuation inside the closing one.)
To address the commas/semicolons/colons issue that has haunted me for 20 years, I first ran Mike’s search to put a non-joiner after italic text, then searched for non-joiners followed by one of those: (~j)(,|;|:) with my italic character style in the Change Format box. I’ll have to add more punctuation to the search.
These are going to save me a ton of time–even though I’ll probably never be confident enough to click Change All. On some books this has taken me a full day—or more—and I always knew I probably missed some and/or changed some I shouldn’t have.
Huge thanks to Mike Rankin.December 13, 2021 at 3:01 pm in reply to: Getting rid of a text style that’s used somewhere you can’t find #14351793MemberI should note that I did things slightly differently than usual this time, and that is what caused this whole saga.
Normally after I finish a print layout I save a copy of the file and load my epub paragraph and character styles into it. Then I delete the print book’s styles and choose which epub style replaces each one. Doing it that way, the style is automatically changed anywhere it appears in another style, variable, etc. This time, because of some weird workarounds I’d had to employ in the layout, I couldn’t trust the usual method, so I went through the book and manually changed the styles.December 12, 2019 at 9:20 pm in reply to: GREP to find parentheses touching italic text even if they are not italic? #14323459MemberI might play around with various ways of using tags, but I wish ID could just do what I need. Thanks for the link to that post. I missed it when it was new. Always nice to know I’m not the only one with whatever problem I’m experiencing.
December 6, 2019 at 8:02 am in reply to: Possible to find unstyled character(s) touching styled characters on either/both sides? #14323614MemberResurrecting this old topic as I now can’t get any of the above to work.
Before I found this old topic I was going to post the following as a new one:
Some of the publishers I work for require that parentheses be italicized if the text immediately inside BOTH of them is italic (even if not all text inside is). The writers and editors don’t seem to get it, so I end up with a lot of pairs that are not italic at all when they should be, other pairs with one of each, etc. I would like to be able to do a search for any PAIR of ( and ) where the ( is followed by an italic character AND the ) is preceded by an italic character.
Other publishers I work for require that no parentheses be italicized unless they’re within a string of text that is italic inside AND outside of them. I guess that would be a similar operation, though non-italic spaces or punctuation immediately outside the parentheses could mess it up.It would be nice to be able to do the same thing to look for italic (or bold etc.) characters followed immediately by , ? ! etc. that need to be italicized. I asked about this at PepCon in Chicago years ago and was told there’s no way to do it because it involves searching for multiple styles at once. In other words, you can search for a string in italics that’s followed by a comma, but won’t find any where the comma isn’t also italic. This is pretty much what Jongware was helping with above.
Similar to what I said in the first post of this thread, I’ve been doing it with character styles by making an italic style that’s a bright color (or highlighted using a fat offset colored underline) and another style in a contrasting color that gets applied to all the parentheses (or commas or whatever). Then I have to look through the whole thing for places where they butt up against each other. A search would be better for many reasons.
Quite a few years went by where I didn’t need to do this, so I don’t know whether something in ID has changed that makes Jongware’s suggestions not work or I’m just forgetting some small step in the process.
December 3, 2019 at 7:28 pm in reply to: How I make it easier to see most important styles in panel with tons of them #14323630MemberI’ve been using quick apply pretty much as long as it’s existed in ID. It’s great when you’re applying the same style repeatedly. The problem with it, in my opinion, comes when you’re applying lots of different styles to an imported document. Since you can’t select non-contiguous chunks of text, I don’t feel like you save any annoyance or time when you have to type something into the quick apply dialog (even if it’s just 1 or 2 characters) every time you want to quickly apply.
I’m happy that 2020 allows more shortcuts, though.
Even with both of those options, it’s often necessary to use the style panels and dropdowns, and when it’s a complicated document with tons of styles it can be hard to spot the ones you want.MemberCC2015 does not include size in object styles, correct?
Even when I was using 2015, I did not make empty frames in advance. That would be doing work that InDesign will do for me automatically when I (ctrl-D) place a bunch of images.
And now that I know the Place Gun style technique, it’s easier. You should try it with your Shadow style.
My images are not going into a grid or other pre-planned layout. After I place them and get the size correct, I have to put them in different places based on where they are referenced in the text. And since my object style has text wrap involved, I can have a bunch of empty frames sitting on the page pushing all the text away.
MemberThank you, David! I forgot about the place gun trick years ago.
Just in case I might get a different result, I duplicated my style and named it Place Gun Frame. It DOES set the width correctly AND fits the image proportionally!
In other words, the exact same style that only does the half its job with other names does both its jobs with the PGF name.
That’s weird.It does still leave the frame height alone, so I still have to alt-ctrl-c, but it’s still the first thing I’ve done in InDesign today that’s made me genuinely happy.
MemberI did just discover something that I would not have expected.
If auto-fit is NOT checked in Frame Fitting Options, but something other than “none” is selected in the Fitting dropdown menu, then it still applies that fitting to the object. I thought unchecking auto-fit turned it off. It apparently does not.So that means part of my complaint was incorrect: choosing another style doesn’t apply the auto-fit that was not applied by the style that includes auto-fit. But continuing to apply something that is turned off seems odd. Bug, or am I missing something?
Not applying auto-fit when it is turned on seems like a bug for sure.MemberThe problem has nothing to do with how many images are involved. I could select one image or 100 images and apply the object style.
If the object style includes auto-fit, that is ignored.
If I then select another object style–with auto-fit turned off–for those images, auto-fit happens.MemberThe original poster’s complaint, auto-fit in object styles not working properly, is extremely frustrating.
Importing hundreds of images is just tedious.MemberThis is extremely frustrating. I have to import hundreds of images, almost all of which need to have a width of 264pt.
I created an object style to do this, and I set frame fitting to Fit Content Proportionally.
When I place some images and apply the object style, however, it only does the first step, setting the width without fitting the image. ¸I made two identical object styles, then set one to fit proportionally.
When I apply either of them I get the same result: the frame width is set to 264pt but no fitting occurs.
If I then click on the other style, the images are resized to fit proportionally (but their frames are not–they remain 264pt wide and however tall the original was).
This happens even if the 2nd object style chosen is the one that says NOT to auto-fit.In other words, if I apply the style that should auto-fit, it does not do it. If I then apply the one that should not auto-fit, auto-fit happens.
It works identically if they’re applied in the opposite order, which makes sense because the 2nd one is meant to auto-fit.My intention was to use two styles: the first would set the width AND auto-fit proportionally. The second would be identical but turn off auto-fitting so I could crop the frame without the image inside it resizing. I guess that will still work, except that I’ll always be wondering why it’s not doing exactly what I have told it to do.
Also, is there a way to get it to resize the frame’s height when it auto-fits the image? I don’t like the extra step of hitting alt-ctrl-c every time.
It should be a one-click operation (apply a style that sets width and auto-fits proportionally, then turns off auto-fit so I can crop), but is currently 3 steps (apply a style, apply a second style, alt-ctrl-c).I’m using the latest CC2018 in Windows 10.
MemberDwayne: You can make sure track changes is enabled for all the stories they have access to. It’s annoying that we can’t see those tracked changes in the layout (only in story editor), but it does at least give us the ability to reject or refine their changes. The trick is remembering to turn that on BEFORE giving them the green light to edit. I seem to forget about half the time, so I’m often unsure what they did in the first round of edits.
August 21, 2017 at 7:28 am in reply to: Why can't InDesign search in InCopy stories without checking out? #96943MemberI thought I’d tried that, but maybe I never did. Embarrassing oversight if I didn’t, since I’ve done it in lots of other situations where I had locked stories. Thanks.
October 26, 2016 at 7:42 am in reply to: Select All Unused and the color I can't find and see in my spread!? #89328MemberAre there any hidden layers or links that use it? Check the layers panel.
Is there a (possibly unused) paragraph/character/object style that uses that swatch?
Is it on a master page that isn’t used, or an overridden master page object? -
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