GREP in InDesign

GREP In InDesign: a practical guide to designers

By Iván Gómez Sánchez

eBook version design:

Iván Gómez S.

Reviewed by

Luís Felipe Corullón

English translation

Catalina Gómez Valencia

Ramiro Arango

2013-2022 Iván Gómez S.

© All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-958-46-3121-3

To mom, my guide. Wherever you are...

Contents

Introduction

Organization of the manual

Conventions used in this manual

Part One

GREP searches

Definition

Text patterns

Advantages of using GREP searches

Use of GREP commands

Some uses of regular expressions:

Case sensitive

Metacharacters

Wildcards

Negative searches

Repetitions

Zero or One time?

Zero o More times *

One or more times +

Repetition - Exact number of times {n}

Backwards references

Alternatives

Locations

Begining of paragraph ^

End of paragraph $

Begining of word\<

End of word \>

Word boundary \b

Beginning of story \A

End of story \Z

Match

Character set []

GLOBAL SEARCHES

Positive Lookahead (?=)

Negative Lookahead (?!)

Positive Lookbehind (?<=)

Negative Lookbehind (?

Part Two

GREP searches in InDesign

Find and change in InDesign

Applying styles

GREP within Paragraph Styles

Part Three

GREP formulas

GREP Commands in InDesign

GREP codes in InDesign

White spaces

Hyphens

Line breaks

Text anchors

Resources

About the author

Introduction

I find that the most time-consuming tasks in InDesign are applying styles and proofreading. The latter, even though it is not the designer's responsibility, is, in practice, a mandatory task that, besides not involving design, is often not even included in the job costs.

Searches with Global Regular Expression Parser (GREP) allow you to apply paragraph and character styles, and also find text -such as e-mails or telephone numbers- without having to do it manually.

This manual shows how to use Regular Expression on InDesign, automating repetitive tasks such as applying styles and making text changes.

You don't need programming skills or spend long hours writing search-and-replace commands using regular expressions. Due to the widespread use of GREP searches in recent years, it is very easy to find free downloadable libraries on the web. You only need to know the basics of GREP searches to reuse these libraries, or to create search expressions from them to speed up the editing of documents in InDesign.

Organization of the manual

This manual is divided into three parts; the first one, GREP Searches, explains the basics of GREP searches by citing practical examples; the second part, GREP Search and Replacement in InDesign, describes the use of GREP commands specifically within InDesign; the third part, GREP Recipes, contains 40 'formulas' – and their explanation – with some of the most commonly used GREP commands in a typical editorial workflow.

Conventions used in this manual

Italic text

Represents a command within InDesign (ex: File>Open)

Monospaced text

Indicates the text to be typed in the search.and-replace boxes.

This is an example

Texts in a gray box refer to sample text to which the search command is applied.

B:

Text or code to be entered in the Find what: field

C:

Text or code to be entered in the Change to: field

Formula 1

Exercise, Formula title.

Definition

First of all, it is important to understand that GREP is not a programming language; GREP is a tool to perform search and replacement of text in any publication. The fundamental difference with traditional text searches – as the ones we do in applications such as Word