Vertical Type in InDesign using GREP

For those of you that only have a copy of Adobe InDesign, the following tip provides you with a pretty quick and easy way to set vertical type.

First we’ll start by creating a Text Frame that has our soon to be vertical text set in it. For the best result, set the text alignment to Align Centre.

Now that we have the text frame with our text on the page. We’re ready to convert this to Vertical Text.

Getting to GREP

The work-around I choose to use for this is the insertion of a ‘Forced Line Break” … that’s hard work!!! Imagine having to manually press Shift+Return/Enter after each character… surely there must be a quick way to do this?
Oooh yeah… there is… We’ll be using a super-duper quick GREP Find/Change for this.

From the Edit menu choose Find/Change and click the GREP tab

I’m using the GREP option here, because it allows us to search for every individual character in the selected text frame (Story) and say .. “now go and put a forced line break behind it”…

Click the metacharacter menu on the right of the Find what part of the dialog. Metacharacters incidentally are characters that have a special meaning in InDesign.

We’re looking really for any type of character, so let’s choose Wildcards > Any Character.

This adds a single full-stop in the Find what field in the dialog box. Super.

Now on to changing things… What we need to do is put the originally found text back AND add a forced line break behind it. So here we go.

From the metacharacter menu on the right of Change to, choose Found > Found Text. This adds a $0 in the Change to field.

Next from the same menu choose Forced Line Break. This adds \n to the Change to field.

Before we do anything else, ensure the Text Frame is selected, and set the Search option to Story. Then click the Change All button.

Changing the space between characters

In one quick hit, the text will appear Vertically (in reality the text is now broken over a number of lines).

To control the spacing between the characters, either alter the Leading for the text, or set the Vertical Justification to Align Justified (Object > Text Frame Options).

The latter provides you with a nice click and drag method to expand the height of the text frame and automatically insert more space between the characters.

For some alternate approaches you can also refer to David Blatner’s post on the InDesign Secrets blog. A very nice article outlining another couple of InDesign vertical type methods.

The following tip is the 4th tip in a series of tips on GREP that I’m working on. It’s one of my personal favourites. Probably because I’ve worked with so many people in my carreer who set those Ads you find in your letter box twice a week. The local supermarket product advertising material is what I’m talking about.

Because of the amount of GREP styles involved in creating this Paragraph Style, I won’t add screenshots for each step, but instead provide you with step-by-steps on how to get to the end result.

Let’s start working.

Paragraph Style

We will be formatting our Paragraph Style with 6 different character styles, in order to do this I’ve started out by creating a very simple Paragraph Style called “PriceTag”. It merely sets the Alignment of the style and nothing else.

Character Styles

Next with the Paragraph Style applied to two samples, format the samples as you would like them to look. Basically what you’re doing is prepping for the Character Styles. One tip is that I would advice you to change the Kerning setting to Optical so that the  spacing for figure pairs is just that bit better looking.

Once you’ve got the format right. select the formatted text bit-by-bit and define Character Styles for all of the components.

Dollar Symbol is used to set the ‘$’ in $99.99
Dollars is used to set the first ‘99′ (or other number) in $99.99
Decimal Point is used to make the full-stop . disappear in $99.99
Cents is used to set the second ‘99′ in $99.99 in a smaller font and with baseline shift (or superscript if you prefer).
Cents Big is used only when defining a 99c type price and sets the ‘99′.
Cents Symbol sets the ‘c’

Make the decimal disappear

To make the decimal disappear, I set it to 1pt font size and 1% horizontal scaling and change the fill colour to [none]. You might need to play around with this a little till you get things right.

Before we start with the GREP styles… Let’s reset our original text again and clear the character formatting changes we applied for the purpose of character style development.

Right-click the Paragraph Style, and choose Apply “PriceTag” Clear Overrides.

GREP Styles

Time to start creating our 6 different GREP styles that will make up this PriceTag style.

Right-click the Paragraph Style and choose Edit “PriceTag”… Then in the Paragraph Style Options, click the New GREP style button for each of the styles listed below and follow the rest of the prompts listed.

Setting Dollar Symbol

Change Apply Style to: Dollar Symbol

Clear the Expression in To Text. Cool so the literal text we’re look at here is the dollar sign itself. Unfortunately we can’t just enter a $, as that character is one of the reserved characters for GREP. We’ll “escape” it by placing a backslash in front of it ‘\‘.

To Text: \$

Setting Dollars

Now to those dollars. Change Apply Style to: Dollar Symbol

The Expression in To Text has already got the /d+ in it (Wildcards > Any Digit, Repeat > One or More Times), to allow for the dollars digits to be formatted.

Place the cursor after the /d+

It’s now time to insert a Positive Lookahead. The dollar ‘digits’ are placed ahead of the full-stop (decimal point) and that’s what we’re looking for when defining the GREP expression that sets these. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the digits are ahead of the full-stop, then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookahead. This adds (?=) to the expression. All we need to do know is, insert the full-stop inside this part of the expression.  Again, the ‘.‘ actually has a reserved meaning in GREP, so we must escape it with the ‘\‘.  Insert these characters before the closing parenthesis.

To Text: \d+(?=\.)

Setting Decimal Point

Change Apply Style to: Decimal Point.

Clear the Expression in To Text.We’re once again inserting literal text here ‘.’ and as in the previous GREP style we must escape the character and are thus inserting ‘\.‘

To Text: \.

Setting Cents

Wow, we’ve made it to the Cents. That means we’re half way there   Change Apply Style to: Cents.

As previously mentioned the expression in To Text has already got the /d+ in it (Wildcards > Any Digit, Repeat > One or More Times), to allow for the cents digits to be formatted.

Place the cursor in front the /d+

It’s now time to insert a Positive Lookbehind. The cents ‘digits’ are placed behind of the full-stop (decimal point) and that’s what we’re looking for when defining the GREP expression that sets these. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the digits are behind the full-stop, then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookbehind. This adds (?<=) to the expression. All we need to do know is, insert the full-stop inside this part of the expression, similar to how we did this for the Positive Lookahead (?<=\.)

To Text: (?<=\.)

Setting Cents Big

Ha, time for another Positive Lookahead  the bigger cent digits ahead of the ‘c’

Character Style setting first… Change Apply Style to: Cents Big

The Expression in To Text has already got the /d+ in it. Place the cursor after the /d+

It’s now time to insert the second Positive Lookahead. The bigger cent ‘digits’ are placed ahead of the ‘c‘. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the digits are ahead of the ‘c‘, then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookahead. This adds (?=) to the expression. Then insert ‘c‘  characters before the closing parenthesis.

To Text: \d+(?=c)

Setting Cents Symbol

We’ve made it to the last GREP style, another Positive Lookbehind… remember the ‘c’ behind the bigger cent digits

Character Style setting first… Change Apply Style to: Cents Symbol.

The Expression in To Text has  got the /d+ in it. This time we’ll clear that.

Instead we will insert the ‘c’ first and place our cursor in front of the ‘c’.

We’ll insert a Positive Lookbehind. The ‘c’ is placed behind the bigger cent ‘digits’. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the c is behind the digits then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookbehind. This adds (?<=) to the expression.

My instinct was to insert \d+ inside this expression, but that doesn’t work. Instead we’ll have to insert a Character Set that tells the expression the c can sit behind a 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9.

Place the cursor in front of the closing parenthesis. Then choose from Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Character Set. This adds [] to the previous insertion.

We’ll now insert the characters, and if we enter 0-9 we’re basically defining all of digits.

To Text: (?<=[0-9])c

Wow… we’ve made it to the end Click OK to update the Paragraph Style.

Ready to apply our new Paragraph Style with Grep Styles to our Price Tag text frames.

If you want to make things even more exciting, then enable the Paragraph Style option as part of a fancy Object Style… and all your formatting will be applied through the Object Style.

Video Tutorial

This is the third in a series of tutorials I’ll be writing up about GREP styles. The previous GREP Tutorial is about applying a different style to figures.

In this tutorial we look at how we can convert text typed in Capital Letters to Small Caps.

Let’s get started.

We’re jumping straight into the Paragraph Style and GREP style this time around (see the previous tips (1) and (2) for different approaches)

Right click the paragraph style in the Paragraph Styles panel to edit it and in the Paragraph Style Options click GREP Style.

Then Click New GREP Style, this adds a third GREP Style to our “Body Text” paragraph style.

At the bottom of the Apply Style pop-up I can still choose New Character Style. Yay! That’s very cool. Thank you Adobe!

I’m naming my style Small Caps (OT). Hmmm wonder why?

Changing Cases

So someone typed in A.M and P.M. through this James Cook Voyages diary manuscript whilst holding down the Shift-key on the keyboard. Normally that would require a painful Find/Change that changes them to lowercase first, before we can change them back to small caps, as presently no “Upper Case” style has been recorded.

However since I’m using an Open Type font for my Body Text, I can prevent myself from having to jump through all sorts of hoops – Type > Change Case, being another one of them – to get this looking right.

One of OpenType’s extended features is that of having the ability to set true small caps characters to text, regardless of the current formatting.

John D. Berry talks about extended features including the OpenType small caps feature back in October 2006, in an article he wrote for Creative Pro.Com. It’s worth a read.

Let’s click Basic Character Formats and look at the Case menu.

There it is the Open Type All Small Caps.  Let’s choose this and click OK to define our newly created Character Style for our GREP style.

So that’s it our Character Style has been defined. Let’s get to the GREP Expression.

GREP Expression

Basically there are only two occurrences of text that I want to change in Cook’s journal. The words “A.M.” and “P.M.”.  So what I’m looking at setting is that either A.M. OR P.M. when encountered must be formatted using our Character Style.

OR, means that either A.M or P.M. can appear in the paragraph. There is no need for both of them to be inserted as text in the paragraph.

To set the expression, let’s start by entering A.M. as literal text for the To Text (I’m making a mistake here on purpose, we’ll fix that in a little while).

Match

So what is it we are trying to match with our GREP style… Oooh yes, A.M. or P.M.

Now as to the OR…

From Special Characters for Search choose Match > Or

Next let’s set P.M.  And ensure you click the Preview box in the Paragraph Style Options dialog to see the effects of the current settings.

It looks kind-off OK… but no it’s not.

Remember back in the first GREP tutorial, I mentioned that certain characters are reserved by GREP for other things. We actually used one of them in our very first GREP the “.” (fullstop), and it meant “Any Character”. Now that we are looking closer, you might notice that not only the word “A.M.” is set to small caps, but the word ARM as well.

The solution is that we need to change this “.” “Any Character” into a literal character… and that’s done by escaping it with the “\” (Backslash) character.  We’ll need to make this change manually.

Once we’ve made this change our third GREP style is completed.

Video Tutorial

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

InDesign CS3 introduced the ability to perform GREP Find/Changes, making it easier for us to apply character styles to text pattern strings such as ‘all text’ between parentheses.  InDesign CS4 introduces the ability to lock this pattern based application of character styles into your Paragraph Styles.

In the upcoming series of tips I hope to introduce some uses of GREP Styles as demoed during the June 2009 – InDesign User Group meeting in Perth.

This first GREP style tutorial tutorial looks at how we can automatically apply a character style to all text between parentheses.

All of the paragraphs for which the text between parenthesis must be set in Italic have already had a Paragraph Style “Body Text” applied to it.

Define a Character Style

In preparation for the GREP style, I prefer to create the Character Styles required prior to defining the GREP style components (Character Style and Expression).

To define a Character Style:

highlight some text in the Body Text paragraphs and change its formatting. I’ve changed the Font Style to Medium Italic.

Next choose New Character Style from the Character Styles panel menu and Name the Style. I’m naming mine “Medium Italic”.

Click OK to add the style to the Control Panel. I’m purposely not clicking “Apply Style to Selection’, as the text I formatted with Medium Italic is only used as the basis for the Character Style definition.

Because we set some of the text in Medium Italic (Font Style), our Paragraph Style now indicates with the ‘+’ icon that this format is not native to the Paragraph Style. Let’s remove this format override, by clicing the Clear Overrides icon at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel.

It is now time to add the GREP Style to our Paragraph Style.

GREP Style

Right-click the Paragraph Style and select Edit “Body Text” to edit the style. The Paragraph Style Options dialog appears. Click GREP Styles.

First of all lets set the Character Style that we’re going to apply to the GREP Expression we’re inserting in just a moment. From the Apply Style drop down choose the Character Style created earlier.

The Character Style we want to apply is “Medium Italic”.

Oops did you forget to create the Character Style? Don’t worry, from InDesign CS4, you have the ability to create your Character Style right here in the Paragraph Style Options dialog. Have a look at the bottom of the Apply Style pop-up and notice the “New Character Style”.

GREP Expression

It’s time to get GREPPING… so what was that pattern again we were looking for? An Open Parenthesis character, followed by any type of text (alpha-numerical, spaces etc. all allowed), finished off with a Closing Parenthesis character.

Symbols

If you are already a GREP wiz you might be able to enter the required GREP expression in the To Text field. However I personally prefer constructing the expression bit-by-bit. The Special Characters For Search pop-up is a great help in constructing the expression. InDesign will automatically insert the correct expression data.

Our Open Parenthesis Character is part of the Symbols group.

As choose this component, you might notice that the text entered in the To Text field is now set to \(.  Certain symbols are reserved by GREP for particular expression components. The Parenthesis form part of this group of characters. For our GREP Expression to recognise the  “(” as a literal character it must be preceded by a “\” character. This “\” is referred to as an Escape Character.

Each of the following characters is reserved by GREP: * ^ } ] ) $ . { [ ( | + ? ~

If you want to use these characters as a literal character in a GREP expression, you must escape them with the “\”.

Wildcards

Next we’re after our next part of the expression: The any text or words etc. that are inserted prior to the closing parenthesis.

When you are looking for ANYTHING… Think of the fact that you know that this ANYTHING might be an “a” or a “b” or really any character of the alphabet, and even numbers or spaces.

Wildcards are a way of defining an “ANYTHING”.  And as we’re looking for any type of character, not just Digits (numbers), Letters (alphabetical) or White Space (spaces), we’re choosing Wildcards > Any Character.

A “.” is added to the GREP expression.

Repeat

You might think at this stage that you’re there… Not quite… GREP Expressions need to know home many times on ef these Any Characters can occur… So we need to know tell the Expression how many times this Any Character can repeat itself.

Let’s assume we don’t encounter “()” (without text between the parentheses). So we’re looking at One or More occurrences.

Shortest Match

So what would happen if there is more than one set of “()” within a paragraph? Well, this is where the Shortest Match option comes in handy. Shortest Match looks for the first occurrence of the “(” and the first occurrence of the “)”, the shortest possible string it can find in the paragraph, and that is exactly what we’re after

So let’s choose Repeat > One or More Times (Shortest Match).  This adds “+?” to the expression.

We’re almost there at this stage. All we need to add to our expression now is the Closing Parenthesis character. We jump back to Symbols for that one.

Choose Symbols > Close Parenthesis Character

Our finished expression is \(.+?\)

Any text between brackets is now set using our GREP style. Click OK to apply the GREP style to the Paragraph Style and see the finished result.

Video Tutorial

InDesign out-of-the-box, does not contain a ‘Make Fraction” command, like other applications such as QuarkXPress have, so if you’re a Quark converter (Welcome a-board by the way!!!), how do you go abouts creating fractions in InDesign?

So how can setting fractions be made easier? Well, there are a number of options available. Let me take you through five different methods…

Option 1 – Use OpenType font with fraction support

Quite a few OpenType fonts you use a font such as Adobe Garamond Pro, which has really good fraction support, creating fractions is pretty easy. Type the fraction e.g. 1/2, highlight the text, then from the Character panel menu select OpenType > Fractions.

Alternatively, select OpenType > Fractions from the Control Panel menu or select OpenType > Fractions in the Character Style Options dialog.

If you regularly use this feature consider applying a shortcut to this comment, by choosing Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, then select Product Area > Panel Menus and scroll down to Character:OpenType:Fractions, set Context to Text, seen as you’d only apply this shortcut when working with text and for instance choose shortcut Command+Shift+F (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+F (Win). Click Assign, to add the shortcut to your shortcut set. If you’ve not yet created a new shortcut set you’ll be prompted to create a new set. Click OK to acknowledge the changes made and close the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog.

The advantage of using the OpenType Fraction feature, is that you can easily resize your text and the fractions will remain typographically correct. Something the “Make Fraction” command in QuarkXPress for instance doesn’t do, as it simpley resizes the text before and after the ‘/’ and amends the baseline shift when generating fraction.

Option 2 – Find/Change with OpenType support

Ok, so you’re using a OpenType font with fraction support. Yay!!!
With Find/Change you can to set your all fractions in one hit! Using the GREP feature, now, that would save some time.
Set Find what:
Wildcards > Any digit \d
that is Repeated > One or More Times \d+
followed by a slash-character \d+/
followed by another Wildcards > Any digit \d+/ \d
that is Repeated > One or More Times \d+/ \d+

Set Change to:
Select Found > Found Text $0

Set Change Format:
Style Options: Character Style > fraction.

This fraction Character style, would just enable the OpenType Features setting for Fractinos.When using Superscript Position setting, you’ll have to have a bit of a play with the Edit > Preferences > Advanced Type, superscript Position and Size settings for the document to ensure you generate the best looking fraction for the font you’re using.

Next… click Change All.

Option 3 – Use a Script

You’re using a font that doesn’t support Fractions? Bummer… Naaaaah… not really… Dan Rodney developed a Proper Fraction script that helps you generate fractions. The Proper Fraction script is available in Free format as well as low cost Pro Script (that finds all fractions and formats automatically).

The Free Script allows you to highlight some text, then generate the fraction either by running the ProperFraction 2.0-Size DanRodney.js script which really replicates what the “Make Fraction” command in QuarkXPress does (e.g. reduce font size, set baseline shift). I’d vote for not using this particular script as it has the same limitations when text is resized later on.

The second sript ProperFraction 2.0-HScale-VScale DanRodney.js is a bit better in that it utilises a combination of horizontal and vertical scaling and baseline shift. Although text resizing is still an issue, due to the baseline shift, which Rodney acknowledges in his notes for the script, he also recommends the quick fix to use after resizing text, which is utilising Find/Change to correct the baseline shift values as required.

Option 4- Find/Change no OpenType support

Ok, you want to set fractions for your core body text and don’t want to pay for a script and are not using an OpenType font with Fractions support?

Well here’s one way of fixing things… still a multi-step process…

Let’s look at using Edit > Find/Change again… and use GREP once more…

Set Find what:
Wildcards > Any digit \d
that is Repeated > One or More Times \d+
followed by a slash-character \d+/

Set Change to:
Select Found > Found Text $0

Set Change Format:
Style Options: Character Style > superscript.

This superscript Character style, would just set the Basic Character Position to Superscript and if I may recommend, also set the Kerning setting to Optical. If your text is formatted with an OpenType font that supports Denominator and Nominator font settings, then utilise the Nominator OpenType feature.

When using Superscript Position setting, you’ll have to have a bit of a play with the Edit > Preferences > Advanced Type, superscript Position and Size settings for the document to ensure you generate the best looking fraction for the font you’re using.

Next… click Change All.

Continue with the following Find/Change command:

Set Find what:
A slash-character /
followed by Wildcards > Any digit / \d
that is Repeated > One or More Times /\d+

Set Change to:
Select Found > Found Text $0

Set Change Format:
Style Options: Character Style > subscript.

This subscript Character style, would just set the Basic Character Position to Subscript and if I may recommend, also set the Kerning setting to Optical. If your text is formatted with an OpenType font that supports Denominator and Nominator font settings, then utilise the Denominator OpenType feature.

When using Subscript Position setting, you’ll have to have a bit of a play with the Edit > Preferences > Advanced Type, superscript Position and Size settings for the document to ensure you generate the best looking fraction for the font you’re using.

Next, click Change All.

Ok, so at this stage you would have ended up with a document that has fractions looking like this:

What we really need to do at this stage is locate all the /-characters in the fractions and turn the default slash character to a “fraction slash”.

Set Find what:
A slash-character /

Set Find Format:
Style Options: Character Style > subscript.

What we’d like to do at this stage is change that slash to a Fraction Slash. We’ll have to discover what the Unicode character for that is.

For my font ‘2044′. We’re now ready to set the Change To settings.

Set Change to:
\x{2044} (use \x{nnnn} and replace nnnn with the Unicode).

Set Change Format:
Style Options: Character Style > [None]. (to remove the subscript style).
Basic Character Formats: Normal (to remove the subscript)

Change All…

Wow, that is a lot of steps to get some fractions set in your document.

Luckily InDesign comes pre-installed with the FindChangeByList.jsx script that allows you to perform multiple finds in ONE hit! So yes, you can perform all of the preceding tasks in a single hit.

Option 5 – FindChangeByList

The FindChangeByList.jsx script utilises a text file located in the InDesign CS3/Scripts/Scripts Panel/Sample Scripts/JavaScripts/FindChangeSupport directory, called FindChangeList.txt as way of setting a series of Find/Changes and applying them as a single command.

If you rename the default .txt file in this directory – which is the text file containing instructions the script uses by default – and create a new file called ‘fractions.txt’ somewhere, you’ll prompted to point to the .txt file that contains your Find/Changes when running the script.

Rather than typing out all of the previously set Find/Change settings (option 4), I’ve attached a sample .txt file for you to use, simply change your style names and the script will work for you too!

The one thing that you’ll have to do is to adjust your Preferences > Advanced Type > Character Settings for Superscript and Subscript to provide the best positioning and sizing for the core font you’re using.

Here’s a link to the fractions.txt file I’ve created as a sample for you.

Web-reference: GrepTutor (2008, Rorohiko)
Web-reference: Grep-it-and-sort-it (2008, Cari Jansen)
Web-reference: Grep examples, downloadable InDesign file, with some of the GREP samples I used during last year’s GREP session at the InDesign Conference in Melbourne (2008, Cari Jansen)

During the GREP session at the InDesign Conference in Melbourne late August last year, I demoed the “swapping of first name and surnames” and have been meaning to add a tip on this to my blog for sometime in which we GREP it and then sort the names alphabetically. Last night’s visit to the Brisbane IDUG, incidently my first visit to an Australian IDUG, in which Iain presented a great series of short InDesign tips and tricks reminded me

The pattern

GREP is all about search for patterns in text and applying format or pattern changes to found text. Let’s make the following assumption. A tab-delimited file was placed in InDesign, possibly originating from Excel. Names are listed as: “FirstName <tab> LastName”So how do we find these with use of GREP and swap them around? Well, let’s review the pattern we are looking for: we are looking for “a series of characters” that is followed by a “tab-character” and ends with another “series of characters”. Time to start looking.

Find/Change

Select Find/Change… from the Edit menu and click the GREP tab. This change the Find/Change dialog to “GREP” mode.

Marking Subexpression

Subexpressions are like smaller ’sub-parts’ of a Find that can be reused for various purposes. To find the above pattern we’ll use subexpressions. We’ll need at least two subexpressions. One for the “first name” and one for the “surname”. Select Match > Marking Subexpression from the “Find What” Metacharacters menu. Insert two subexpressions.

A marking subexpression is an expression that may be recalled. Non-marking ones can not be recalled.

“()()” is now listed in the “Find What” field.The round brackets encapsulate the subexpressions. Between the two subexpression we are looking for a Tab character. Insert the cursor between the two subexpressions. Next Select Tab from the “Find What” Metacharacter menu.

“()\t()” is now listed in the “Find What” field

Wildcard characters

Within each of the subexpressions you’re now looking for any character that might appear one or more times. As the first name or the surname can contain spaces. Place the cursor between the brackets of the first subexpression and select Wildcards > Any Character from the “Find What” Metacharacters menu. Repeat this for the second subexpression.

“(.)\t(.)” is now listed in the “Find What” field

One or More times

Your’re not looking for single character first or surnames but for one or more characters.Place the behind the ‘.’ inside the subexpression. Select Repeat > One or More Times from the “Find What” Metacharacters menu. Repeat this for the second subexpression.

“(.+)\t(.+)” is now listed in the “Find What” field

Change

We’re now ready to make the change. When we are finding things we are finding a pattern that contains two subexpressions. In the “Change To” field we want to return the second expression first and the first expression second. Insert your cursor in the “Change To” Field. Select Found > Found 2 from the “Change To” Metacharacter menu to return the second subexpression info first, then Select Found > Found 1.

“$2$1″ is now listed in the “Change To” field. I’d like for the Names Listing to be formatted using the NamesList paragraph style. This paragraph style uses a nested style called “Bold” that formats the surname in “Bold”. However as surnames could consist of more than one word we’d need to insert another type of delimiter through which we can set the change for Nested Styles. The End Nested Style Character Here will do the job To prep the changed text for this, insert your cursor between the $2 and $1. Select Other > End Nested Style Character Here from the “Change To” Metacharacters menu.

Add a Space behind the ~h to prevent the first and surnames from becoming one word.
“$2~h $1″ is now listed in the “Change To” field.

Change Formatting

You’re ready to set the Change Formatting now. Click the Format Settings button next to the Change Formatting to set the Change Format settings.

If you don’t see this part of the dialog, click More Options.

Set the Paragraph style to “NamesList”, click OK.

Making the change

You are now ready to make the change. Select the Names Listing text you’d like to apply the change to. Ensure the Search option is set to “Selection”.

Next press Change All.

Sorting the paragraphs

Time to sort the paragraphs now. highlight the names listing again, and Show the Scripts panel (Window > Automation). From the Application/JavaScripts/Sample Script double click “Sort Paragraphs”.

You’re now done. Listing now displays Surname Lastname and is sorted in alphabetical order.

Web Reference: InDesignCS3 GREP examples (2007, Cari Jansen)