If you’re not quite ready to begin constructing your own queries yet, you can look at some of the saved preset queries to start testing GREP immediately. The small symbol next to each field opens a cascading popup menu that lists all the potential GREP metacharacters you can use in your queries. GREP can be used in both the Find what: field and the Change to: field, which allows you to dynamically restructure your text content. Near the top of the Find/Change dialog window, you’ll see a series of tabs that allow you to run various types of searches through your document: Text, GREP, Glyph, Object, and Color.Ĭlick the GREP tab to search your document using GREP queries. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command + F (use Ctrl + F if you’re using InDesign on a PC). To get started, open the Edit menu and click Find/Change. There are a few example GREP queries from Adobe, and you can also experiment with constructing your own GREP searches without having to make any changes to your document. Using the Find/Change dialog is a great way to start getting familiar with GREP in InDesign. Instead of having to search your text by hand to apply specific formatting to phone numbers, dates, keywords, etc., you can configure a GREP search to locate the desired text and automatically apply the correct formatting.Ī properly constructed GREP search can save you many long hours of work and guarantee that you won’t miss any instances of the text you want to adjust. GREP can also be used as part of a paragraph style to apply a specific character style to any text that matches the GREP search pattern. This can be useful for locating any formatting mistakes, punctuation errors, or just about anything else that you may need to dynamically locate. When used with the Find/Change command, a GREP search can be used to locate and replace any part of your text that matches the GREP specifications. There are two ways to use GREP searches within InDesign: using the Find/Change command and within a Paragraph Style. If that isn’t confusing enough, these metacharacters can be combined using additional logical operators to cover a range of potential results within a single GREP search. The extensive list of metacharacters covers virtually any character or text-based situation you can construct in InDesign, from character patterns to the spaces between words. To accomplish this kind of pattern-based search, GREP uses a specialized set of operators known as metacharacters: characters that represent other characters.Ĭontinuing the example of the yearly date, the GREP metacharacter used to represent ‘any digit’ is \d, so a GREP search for \d\d\d\d would return all the locations in your text that have four digits in a row. Instead of going through your document line by line, looking for each mention of a yearly date and adjusting the numeral style by hand, you can construct a GREP search that will look for any string of four numbers in a row (i.e., 1984, 1881, 2003, and so on). Within InDesign, GREP can be used to search through your document text, looking for any text that matches the specified pattern.įor example, imagine that you have a very long historical document that regularly lists yearly dates, and you want the numerals for each year to use the Proportional Oldstyle OpenType formatting style. If that doesn’t make sense yet, don’t feel bad – GREP is much closer to programming than it is to graphic design. The term GREP (Global Regular Expression Print) is originally the name of a command from the Unix operating system which can be used to search through files for text strings that follow a specific pattern. GREP can be difficult to learn, but it is unrivaled in terms of flexibility and power. GREP can also be used with Paragraph Styles to apply custom formatting to specific text string patterns automatically.GREP is available in the InDesign Find/Change dialog for automatic text replacement.GREP is a type of computer code that uses metacharacters to search your InDesign document text for any matches to a predefined pattern.GREP is an acronym from the Unix operating system that stands for Global Regular Expression Print.
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