Well, you are getting there. Take small steps, that's all.

Your GREP would work … apart from two tiny things. The '+' at the end is not necessary! After any GREP command, you can add a 'repetition' code, which may be one of ?, *, or +, or an exact number or number range, like {5} or {3,6}. (And after that you can add another ?; this indicates that the lowest possible number of repetitions ought to be taken, rather than the largest number — which is the default setting.) In this case, I think that InDesign will interpret it as “5 digits-plus-a-period”, and then repeat this as much as possible, marking all possible sets of 5, rather than what you intended, only one set of 5.

The other thing is, you set a lower limit (the {5}) but you don't specify what ought to be next. So five digit-headings would be marked, but the first 5 of a six-digit heading as well. To prevent that, matching should stop right after the five you already have, and the easiest way is: because you don't want to find a match for a number after the 5th digit, it should match “not-a-digit” … (Obvious, really.) The code for not-a-digit is this: D, so your GREP will work like this:

^(d+.){5}D

There is a tiny, tiny catch: if 5 digits (and their periods) are matched, the character right after it (the I-Am-Not-A-Digit) will also be marked, because it's 'inside' the regular expression. Now in ordinary use, like bolding or italicizing the heading number, and assuming the next character will typically be a space, it won't really matter; but if you change the heading marker to be underlined, you will see the underlining stick out into the next character. So a slightly better version is, with the help of my little friend Lookahead:

^(d+.){5}(?=D)

meaning that it will find a set of 5 digits-plus-periods which must be followed by a Not-A-Digit character — the Lookahead matches, but does not mark, the text.

(This is a Positive Lookahead; there is also a Negative Lookahead, slightly more logical in this case:

^(d+.){5}(?!d)

— the same as above, only it now reads “.. which must not be followed by a digit”, which is more natural than the double negative.)

By the way #1: use d+, rather than d! Or else it will fail (silently) on “1.2.5.6.10. “

By the way #2: this forum eats backslashes for breakfast. Only feeding it a double breakfast makes it spit out a single one: type “\d” to get “d”. Be careful when editing your post, all double backslashes will appear as singles again.

Joe, there is no text box for the footnotes. It's much simpler than that.

Look at the first line of the next page: you can see a tiny superscript '1' in there. I bet that's another footnote, and that footnote text is longer than can fit (with the text line attached to it) in the space available above the footnote 2 on the previous page, and I also bet that Jahmin does not allow footnotes to break across pages. So … InDesign has no choice but to move the footnote (along with the text line it belongs to) to the next page.

It's totally intentionally, and correct behavior. You are used to left-to-right text, so the arrows on your cursor seem to “point the right way”. However, you should interpret them as “move to previous character” and “move to next character” — and in that case, it's logical that they move in the other direction for RTL languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Imagine the confusion if this hadn't been done this way — what ought the Backspace key do?

There is no “unless” or “otherwise”, option you will have to do the S&R in two steps.

First search for this:*

(?<=d)(bis|ter|quater)b

and specify “Regular” in the Find formatting; put your italics char style in the Change To formatting field.

Then make a new char style “Regular”, and this time look for Italics in the Find formatting. It will work, not picking up any of the texts you replaced above with italics, because of this little GREP Gripe!

(* See how you can do lots of searches in one go? The b End-of-Word code at the end assures it won't pick up anything nasty.)

Hmm, no idea really. Can you try and see what happens with this?

(?!D)LT

(essentially, “LT” not preceded by not a digit :) — be warned, it will also pick up LT's at the start of a line …).

You could try resetting your preferences; perhaps some leftovers of the Christmas dinner got stuck in ID's throat.

A-ha — at least that last thing makes sense. Text variables pick up stuff by the paragraph, and can use either the first occurrence on a certain page, or the last occurrence. And yes: it'll only pick up one paragraph.

Do you mean you want to replace the nested style with a GREP style? That can be done in a number of ways, the exact way depends on your 'normal' ways. This one, for example, will apply its character style up to and including the first comma, regardless of the number of characters/words:

^w+,

If there may or may not be a comma, you can use this — it detects the text that ought to follow:

^.+(?= from page)

… You can also “cheat” and tack the two words together with a fixed space ;)

No.