GREP in InDesign

Applying Styles with GREP Find/Change

From InDesign CS4 you can apply character styles automatically using GREP Styles in the Paragraph Style dialog. This is a powerful and flexible way of applying character styles, but it is often easier and/or more efficient to apply styles using the Find/Change dialog. Besides, it’s not possible to apply paragraph styles using GREP styles. Here we go into applying styles using the Find/Change dialog, GREP styles are illustrated separately; see the section “GREP Styles” on page 55.

Say you have a book with numbered chapters and numbered sections, such that Chapter 1 has first-level sections 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc., Chapter 2 contains sections 2.1, 2.2, and so on. These sections can have subsections—second-level sections—numbered 1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc. There might be more, but let’s assume that this text has two levels of section numbering. The documents you’re processing have no styles applied to them at all, so you’re starting from scratch. Let’s say that you use paragraph style secA for the first-level sections and secB for the second-level ones. How can we use GREP to save us from at least part of the tedium of finding the section headings in the documents and applying the appropriate styles to them?

First we need to have an idea what those section headings in fact look like in the documents and devise an expression that catches them all. Well, each is a series of digits and dots, with a space between the number and the body. While you’re working ...