You can purge a file of unnecessary plugin data by exporting it as INX (CS3 and earlier) or IDML (CS4 (and, presumably, newer!)).

You can simply “Open” the new document.

Make sure you save a copy of your original document somewhere — it's not a 100% totally fireproof procedure.

.. GREP is case-sensitive

True

and whole word by default. ..

False :-D

Massey, are you using hotkeys for “Find Next” and “Find Next Grep”? I don't (well, only for regular “Find next”) and never have had this problem.

That's … cumbersome. (It is! Honestly!)

1. You might have used the regular search & replace. (Unless you did need one of the more advanced GREP-only functions to do more — you don't mention it, though, so I think you didn't need to.)

2. The parentheses are 'special' inside GREP. They “mark” a group, and do not take part in the searching/replacing. This is an important feature of GREP — perhaps you replaced a few “Swim4life” without parentheses as well, as these will also have been found!

3. Heh — and in the third round, you could also have used regular search & replace to remove those parentheses … You certainly didn't have to replace them with a space — you can also search for something and replace with nothing.

The proper way to search for parentheses in a GREP expression is to un-make them special. As it happens, putting them inside square brackets is a way (and you could even have removed both open and close at once, using “[()]” — a sidenote), but the recommended way to search for a character that's normally “special” is to precede it with a backslash. That's the magic marker you were looking for. So

(Swim4life)

would have found only the phrases including their parentheses.

(Edit because the lil' backslash gremlin ate my backslashes! I'll feed him a few more, just to humour him: and a 6th, for good measure: )

They also have unbeatable prices and good quality work.  And right now cost is a huge factor.

That sounds they have a fixed way of processing others' documents. Hard to argue with, indeed. Can you ask them (nicely) why they won't accept PDFs? IDML only has been around for, what, 18 months? And it's not likely to be going “the document format of the future”, Adobe has always reserved that particular phrase for PDFs.

Alternatively, always do the best job you can and let someone else make a mess — so you can point out that you've been warning everyone, like, forever!

… If my printer didn't want the orginal Indesign files …

Sorry to break in, but that's really a bad way of working. We're in the 21st century now, and have been for some time …

It's time to face your boss and list the number of things that can go wrong in such a workflow … If he has a couple of hours, that is.

I was hoping someone else would come up with some brite idea. … Both Index and Table of Contents are firmly based on the concept of “page numbers”, and you can't really blame Adobe for this ;-)

Did you try the Table of Contents Advanced options? It is possible to sort entries alphabetically, and it's also possible to not insert page numbers. However, that leaves the issue of your hymn numbers — best would be if you could insert a flush right tab right away. You do need them on the right of your titles (so you can insert flush tabs manually), and that might need some trickery in setting up your styles, etc., etc.

TOC trickery is not really my fortay …

Depending on your exact needs, you can or you can't do that with InDesign.

InDesign does not support “setting a background color” for text. Fortunately, there are a few tricks that do work in some circumstances. The most popular is the Paragraph Rule.

This only works with single line stuff (like your heading!). In your heading style, define a Paragraph Rule Below. Make it thick enough for your text plus some more — about the height of the leading. Set the Offset to about minus half that value. Enable “Preview” so you can tinker with it until you are satisfied.

Unfortunately, if you run into the odd multi-line heading, the Paragraph Rule thing will not seem to work. Actually, it does but exclusively with a fixed number of lines, so you have to define separate styles for 1-line headings, 2-line headings, etc., each with a different line thickness and vertical offset.