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d+(?=t)

which will do the opposite of what you say — it will find digits that are followed by a tab — but I think it does what you meant. (Your computer is perfectly capable of doing what you say, not as good in doing what you want.)

Ah well. I've never found out what this behavior is triggered by, but it seems very persistent: at work I have several different versions of Word, but a file that's “broken” cannot be made to work by re-saving in any other version. That encompasses saving as .doc, .docx, and .rtf — if the file is broken, it'll stay broken. Let's hear a Yay! for Word's persistent Backwards-Compatible objects.

Once or twice I got so fed up I saved the file as .rtf and opened and then re-saved it with WordPad. Now that's a sure-fire way of expunging every single nasty bit from a file! It's just too bad some of the 'good' stuff goes along with it … You can realistically only do this with files that are plain text to begin with.

By the way, most — unfortunately, not all! — Word files with issues import just fine into CS3. If you have one of these lying around, import the text in there, save, open in CS4 / CS5 / CS6 (hypothetically), then copy the text out of it into the target document.

With 8 distinctly separate styles with each a different hanging indent (count 'em: chapter titles and preambulatory stuff, headings — 3 levels of these –, numbered lists, quotes, regular examples, double indented examples, references), I have no stomach to create yet another style for the odd author using a three-level numbered list. So I use the plain numbered list style, insert one or more extra tabs and merrily stab thine dagger right in there.

It's kind of like using the Forced Line Break (Shift+Enter). I'm urging everyone not ever to use this evil thing but nevertheless content with using it myself everywhere I see fit. (When being Caught in the Act by interns, I always say “Yeah well I'm allowed to use 'em and you are not”.)

Short answer: No.

GREP is not magic, it's a simple text pattern matching system. And it uses a pretty narrow definition of 'text' as well — it's not aware, for example, of InDesign's line endings inside a paragraph, and so stuff like “pages” or “text frames” are totally out of its scope.

For something this complicated and specific you could look into TeX, it might be possible after a couple of years of intensive studying.

It's called “plain text”. ;)

No, InDesign cannot pull in plain (unformatted, untagged etc.) text automatically. You say you are copying one line at a time, and I think that says enough. Even if you select all text in the e-mail at once, then copy it and paste into your InDesign, that's not good enough, right? You have to paste each line at a special place?

InDesign can work with database formats — you might want to Google for “indesign data merge” — but that doesn't help you here, because you'd only move the same problem to another place.

Press this button? (There also is a default hotkey combo for this toggle, you might have accidentally used that.)

It's a built-in font and you cannot use it for yourself, but I've heard somewhere it's based on Myriad Pro.

Probably not.

“Only text and vector graphics” doesn't necessarily imply the file ought to be small. What if you have a lot of text? (And 400 pages certainly sounds like a lot.) Vector images cannot be downsampled, so you're stuck with those as well.

Best is to check with Acrobat Pro's “Optimized PDF” where all the bytes go — sometimes, you can simply discard large chunks of data, such as color profiles per image, or fonts embedded in their entirety.

If that doesn't work, you can always tell your clients the truth: the file is large because there is a lot of stuff in it.