GREP in InDesign: An InDesignSecrets Guide

by Peter Kahrel

Get a grip on GREP, the key to simplifying and streamlining text-heavy work in Adobe InDesign! This is an approachable and friendly reference by one of the world's pre-eminent InDesign scripting and automation experts, Peter Kahrel. Perhaps you’ve seen the GREP tab in Find/Change, and the GREP Style panel in Paragraph Style Options, and wondered, what is it exactly, and why would I use it, and how? Or perhaps you've done a few simple GREP find/change routines, and would like to learn what else is possible that you've been missing? GREP in InDesign is your answer. Armed with this wonderful guide full of real-world examples of using GREP to fix and format text in InDesign, you can learn the ins and outs of this powerful tool. It starts out with the basics — what’s the difference between Text and GREP Find/Change? How do I use GREP to find patterns of text (e.g., 4-digit years, any text between parentheses) and how do I apply formatting to that, or change what it found, throughout the document? Author Peter Kahrel continues with in-depth, more complicated examples, such as swapping first and last names in lists, chaining GREP queries, and using wildcards, lookarounds, and locations in your searches.At the end of the book you'll find a useful Troubleshooting chapter with the most common GREP problems and their fixes, and a Reference section that lists all the Character classes you can use and a GREP Code dictionary.GREP in InDesign is an essential resource for all InDesign-using professionals!

Genres: Design

127 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2019

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very useful and helped me a lot with understanding how to use GREP in InDesign. However, there were some flaws. The book needs some editing. I found some misspellings along the way in the main text.

There were also some inconsistencies/typos in GREP expressions being discussed. He would present expression initially one way and then, when discussing the expression in detail, it would be different from the original expression. For example, in the section, " Swap last name and initials …," the search expression is given as Find what: ([-\w]+),\s(.+) and this works, but in the discussion later, part of the expression has changed to [-\w+], which does not. I found several examples of these typos in the codes, which can be confusing.

Finally, the author links to additional information on his website, which doesn't seem to exist anymore. Several of the links to other resources were outdated as well.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK as a reference but would have preferred more of a step-by-step approach.