Join Michael Murphy for an in-depth discussion in this video Describing inconsistent text, part of Learning GREP with InDesign.
When text is 100% consistent, it's very easy to describe.…Inconsistent text is a bit more challenging, but can also be described with GREP.…In a previous movie, we set up a GREP style that automatically formatted…figure references in a document, and it successfully formatted only the figure…references that appear in parentheses, not the ones that didn't, but excluded…the parentheses from the formatting, using Positive Lookbehind and Positive Lookahead.…This is that document with that style applied.…I am on page 4, and as I scroll down, I can see my styled Figure 11 reference,…and down here later on the page, I see Figure 14 and Figure 15.…
So something is missing.…Something didn't get styled.…I will scroll back up, and you can see here, Figures 12 and 15.…They are not referred to in a consistent manner, as the other figures.…Let's take a look at the Paragraph style itself, and the GREP style built into…it to see what we've got so far.…I'll choose Edit>Auto Figure References, and go to the GREP Style area for that style.…
Author
Michael Murphy
Released
11/18/2009- Using metacharacters, the building blocks of GREP
- Describing text that may not exist with zero operators
- Applying multiple character styles to the same text with GREP styles
- Eliminating orphaned words at the ends of paragraphs
- Preserving and recalling subexpressions
- Customizing a GREP-based text cleanup script for long documents
Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
Views
Q: In the “Dynamically fixing orphaned words with GREP” tutorial the author uses the term:
(?<=\w)\s(?=\w+[[:punct:]]+$)
In an earlier course the author described the + (one or more) modifier as unusable in a lookbehind or lookahead i.e. (?<=.+). What's the difference here?
A: The limitation mentioned in an earlier movie referred only to positive lookbehind and negative lookbehind. I was able to use the one or more times (+) metacharacter in the positive lookahead portion of the expression because that limitation doesn't affect either positive or negative lookahead. It's only when looking backward that GREP ignores the repeat metacharacters.
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Introduction
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Welcome1m 4s
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1. GREP Basics
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What is GREP?1m 53s
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2. Basic Metacharacters
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Escaping out metacharacters2m 49s
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Building with wild cards9m 9s
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Specifying locations7m 4s
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3. Advanced Metacharacters
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Creating "or" conditions5m 24s
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Building subexpressions5m 52s
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4. GREP Styles
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Describing inconsistent text6m 59s
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5. GREP Find/Change
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Understanding queries8m 20s
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Cleaning up text with GREP2m 45s
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6. A Practical Project with Advanced Find/Change and GREP
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Conclusion
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Goodbye27s
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Video: Describing inconsistent text