GREP in InDesign

GREP Styles

GREP styles are a powerful tool to format text automatically (to see just how powerful, see Laurent Tournier’s trick at http://tinyurl.com/yes63gs.) They are one of the three types of nested style—the other two are Nested Styles and Nested Line Styles.

GREP styles are in fact normal character styles that are applied by GREP expressions defined in the Paragraph panel or the Paragraph Style Options dialog. Note that this involves only applying styles: you won’t be able to change any text using GREP styles. In addition, you can’t include formatting in the match, so it’s not possible, say, to match certain strings in italics, at least not without converting to tags as described in “Lookaround and Formatting” on page 48. Nevertheless, GREP styles are a powerful tool. As they are best defined in paragraph styles, that’s what we’ll illustrate here, but it works the same in the Paragraph panel.

To illustrate how to use GREP styles, we’ll implement into them a few of our earlier examples. Some more elaborate examples follow this general outline.

Let’s begin with a GREP style that, once defined, applies small caps to any sequence of more than one capital.

1. Define a character style as usual, call it “smallcaps,” and set “OpenType All Small Caps” as part of its definition (in the Character Style Options dialog, go to Basic Character Formats, then pick “OpenType All Small Caps” from the Case dropdown).

Figure 9. Grep styles

2. Now go into the Paragraph Style Options dialog. Edit ...