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Introducing GREP Styles (2)
By Cari Jansen | July 5, 2009
Digitip 089 – Adobe InDesign CS4 – GREP your Figures
This is the second in a series of short GREP Style tutorials. I introduce GREP styles in the first post in this series. In this short tutorial we look at how we can use a GREP style to change the appearance of any figures within a paragraph style.
Task for this GREP Style is that it changes the formatting on any numerical characters (figures) throughout the Body Text paragraph style.
We’re starting the same way once again. By creating a Character Style that sets the formatting for the figures.
OpenType Fonts and Figures
As I’m using a Open Type font in this example (Minion Pro). I can use OpenType features for figure formatting. Kind of cool.
To create a Character Style that has my figure settings included, I start by highlighting a figure and from the Control Panel menu choose OpenType.
Any OpenType font features listed between square brackets [] are not available to the font. The last group of features are figure specific features: Tabular Lining, Proportional Oldstyle, Proportional Lining, Tabular Oldstyle and the default setting Default Figure Style.
There’s much more to OpenType then just being a cross-platform font. As these fonts are double byte fonts they can contain an expanded character set and provide cool typographical features. Adobe Systems Inc. has a good OpenType Q&A page available as part of their Open Type ‘branch’ on their web-site
In brief (and I’m not font expert to be honest): Oldstyle figures, are generally designed smaller and match with lowercase characters. Lining figures are designed to match uppercase characters. Tabular figures are designed for figure placement in tabular (tabbed/tables) format, e.g. as in financial reports etc. Proportional figures are designed to be proportionaly spaced.
I’m a fan of Proportional Oldstyle, I like the smaller font size.
From the Character Style panel menu choose New Character Style and set the Style Name for the style. I’m setting mine to “Proportional Oldstyle”.
Click OK to add the style to the Character Styles panel.
Paragraph Style
Time to start GREPPING again… and this one will be a quickie 
From the Paragraph Styles panel, right-click “Body Text” (or the style that you want to edit) and choose Edit “Body Text”.
The Paragraph Style Options dialog appears.
Click GREP Style, and click New Grep Style… to add another GREP style to the paragraph style.
Choose the “Proportional Oldstyle” Character Style from the Apply Style list. And believe it or not you’re done.
That’s because the default expression that InDesign inserts is “Any Digit, One or More times”. But let’s imagine your setting the expression anyway
Clear the field data in To Text. Then from the Special Characters for Search pop-up choose:
Wildcards > Any Character
Follow this with: Repeat > One or More times.
Click OK and you’re done
Video Tutorial
Topics: GREP, adobe, digitip, fonts, indesign | 2 Comments »
July 6th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Hi Carl, that’s a good example for learning GREP, indeed. But: As soon you’re defining Old Style Figures in the Paragraph Style your job is done already – without GREP. What could be a more convincing and yet simple example in regard to figures (thinking …)?
July 6th, 2009 at 12:24 am
@Jochen:
Absolutely.
I am trying to provide some demonstrations of what GREP can be used for, and by no means saying that there are no other ways to achieve a similar result
I think each InDesign user develops his or her preferred ways of doing things over time.