Fan of creative technology, elearning, instructional design and a little geeky

Multi-Find/Change 1.02 Released

May 11, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by Cari Jansen

Martinho da Gloria (www.automatication.com), this week released the 1.02 update for the Mulit-Find/Change plug-in he developed for InDesign.

Multi-Find/Change panel

About this plug-in

Whether it’s to fix common formatting issues in manuscripts you import in InDesign for book and EBook publishing, such as removal of double tabs, spaces, paragraph returns, conversion of hyphens to en or em-dashes. Or to apply paragraph/character styles etc. to text that’s imported with multiple style overrides, such as a Word document import containing half a dozen style overrides for the paragraph style style ‘Normal’.  If you find yourself performing the same series of InDesign Find/Change search and replacement actions over and over again, this is a super handy plug-in to have.

The idea behind the plug-in is that you can combine saved Find/Change Queries into Find/Change sets and apply multiple Find/Change commands with a single click. You can build Query Sets for the different groups of Find/Change commands you use for various jobs and Query Sets can be shared between plug-in users.

New features

The 1.02 maintenance release is a free upgrade for current Multi-Find/Change licensees and provides a series of cool new features:

  • The release adds support for InDesign CS5.5 and continues to support InDesign CS4 and CS5.
  • You can now import Find/Change queries when first launching the plug-in after install.
  • You can import and export InDesign’s Find/Change queries to/from any location.
  • And in my opinion the coolest new feature is the ability to use this plug-in to perform a Change Case command as part of a query that’s executed from Multi-Find/Change.

The plug-in in action…

After install the plug-in is triggered from the Window menu.

For each Query that’s added to a Query Sets you can also set Query Options to apply to the result by double clicking the Query name in the Style Set. For those headings that were typed with the Caps Lock on or Shift-key held down, you could for instance use this new Multi-Find/Change feature to fix captilisation issues in the text.

Multi-Find/Change Query Options

In the example above I added 2 saved GREP Queries to a Query Set. Each looks for all text set with a particular paragraph style (Heading 1 or Heading 2 in this case) and the found text is returned, then converted to lowercase through the added Query Option setting  (see screenshot below for InDesign Find/Change settings used).

Find/Change

Note: Although I used the ‘lowercase’ option to change the headings back to lowercase, I applied a GREP style within the paragraph styles that applies an All Caps character style to the first Word character of each sentence.

The result is an automatic fix for the Capitalisation issue on the headings.

Multi-Find/Change end result image

For an earlier recording I made about Multi-Find/Change please check-out the video below.

 

Adobe InDesign, plug-in
Similar posts
  • Adobe InDesign and XML: A Reference Guide — The following is a reference guide I have compiled over time for those of you who are looking at doing a little more with XML in InDesign (originally published Feb. 2011, last updated Feb 2018). If you have any extra information you’d like to see added to this guide, feel free to message me. Mapping XML tags to InDesign [...]
  • How to change the colour of bullet points in InDesig... — A few weeks ago I recorded a short quick tip tutorial. InDesign’s Control panel, gives users a quick and easy way to format text as a bulleted list. Highlight the text, and click the Bulleted List button in the Paragraph Formatting Controls mode for the Control panel. This applies a universal bullet character as the [...]
  • Creating a pop-up window in a PDF with Adobe InDesig... — In the following YouTube tutorial, we’ll create an interactive PDF from Adobe InDesign, in which we click on a button, which in turn opens up a simple pop-up window containing a close-box. When the close-box is clicked the pop-up window disappears [...]
  • InDesign: Facing pages with odd-numbered left pages — Back in 2004 I wrote a tip for InDesign CS on how you could have the first page of your document be a left page AND have it start with page number 1. It’s hard to believe this is almost a decade ago… But a recent question on Facebook, made me think I should really [...]
  • Negative Lookbehind – GREP for Designers — This is the fourth and final blog-posts in a series of posts on lookaheads and lookbehinds in GREP, written after speaking at the Perth InDesign User Group. My speaker notes are also available: What is GREP? (PDF download) (2.4Mb). In the previous three posts I briefly introduced GREP, and we took a look at Positive [...]

No Comments Yet

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *