I’m a fan of the GREP feature of the Find/Change dialog box in Adobe InDesign as it allows me to search for patterns of characters within text based on regular expressions.
As handy as this feature is, I always require assistance writing my GREP searches, just in case my patterns are either too greedy; or not greedy enough. For example, I have a GREP search to find duplicate entries and remove them, but in InDesign the only way to know if I have this correct is to press the Find Next button in the search.
A better way to identify if I have my GREP search correct is to see it in real-time. Luckily, text editors such as BB Edit have this feature.
InDesign’s latest rival, Affinity Publisher, not only has its own flavour of GREP, but also shows all results in the Find and Replace dialog box, though I have to click on each result in this dialog to see where they are.
But it would be great if InDesign highlight the GREPs ahead of time like these two applications. The good news is that it can, but it requires the GREP editor script from Peter Kahrel that has been featured on Colecandoo before.
Thanks to Peter’s GREP editor, I’m now able to see that in this example there are three search results and they are all highlighted.
This tool comes in very handy as it assists me to write more complicated GREP searches, such as this one that is looking for time formatting. This lets me know in real-time if my selection is selecting too much information, or not enough – and in this example, it isn’t enough as the times without the minutes aren’t getting selected.
As for longer, more complicated chains of GREP code, there are resources out there that have pre-baked search chains that other users have already submitted to sites such as RegExLib.com or the Treasures of GREP Facebook group.
Stop Press!
After this article was initially published, I was alerted to another InDesign javascript by Kerntiff Publishing System that has a similar behaviour to Affinity Publisher’s search. The script is called GREP Xtra.
There is also an additional script released in 2013 by Roland Dreger that performs as a combination between Peter Kahrel’s script and the InDesign user interface. That script is called Highlight GREP.
There may be occasions where more than one character style has to be applied to the same words, such as a highlight, italic, etc. I recently saw this request over at the InDesign requests page.
In the request, the requestor does hint at a way that this can already be achieved in InDesign, though it can be time consuming. Let’s start from the beginning and look at some text that has an italic character style applied to it.
But if I apply a separate highlight character style that I’ve also made…
The highlight appears but the italic is removed. Reapplying the italic character style to the word only changes the word back to italic and doesn’t preserve the underline.
One solution is to do a local override – that is to manually apply the appearance but without using a character style
Note the plus that appears to the right of the Paragraph Style 1 – this indicates a local override is present.
That works, but let’s say that the client asks for all italics to now be a tint of the colour initially used. That’s fine if character styles were applied as the italic style needs to be changed once in the properties of the character style. However, all the italics applied using local overrides will need to have their fills reapplied with the new settings.
Yes, the eyedropper tool and find/change can assist, but if character styles were applied, these additional steps would not be necessary.
In this circumstance, making a third style that has both the underline and italic would make sense.
In this case, it adds one more character style – not a big deal, but in a large document, the quantity of character styles can grow fast.
GREP Styles to the rescue
Take this chemical equation in a science textbook. It currently looks like this:
The subscripts in this equation have been applied with a character style that I’ve named sub. However, the author wants the reaction only in bold. If the equation is highlighted and then has a bold character style applied, this happens:
All of the subscript formatting of the numbers are lost.
I can then create a second style called “bold sub” that has bold and subscript properties and base the style on the bold formatting, but I then have to make sure I correctly apply the newly created style to the appropriate numbers… this now introduces a level of human error.
But what if I could apply the bold style and keep the subscripts? It is possible using GREP styles. Using the GREP code from this CreativePro post (look for Laurent Tournier’s post dated Oct 9 2010 in the comments) apply it to the paragraph style.
[editor’s note – I’ve adjusted mine to account for the naming of elements 113-118 as of 2018, so if you want that amended code, contact me via my contact page]
Now apply the paragraph style to the recently bolded text.
Brilliant! Note how the I-beam cursor is between two subscript numbers, yet the character style shows that this is bold only.
This technique can also be applied to other formatting where subscripts or superscripts need to be preserved, such as:
Ordinal Numbers
Numbers written with scientific notation
Squared or cubed measurements
It just requires the right GREP syntax. All of the above examples used GREP styles to format the subscripts and superscripts only. To learn this technique and others, apply to join the Treasures of GREP Facebook page.
Once again to illustrate the point, the author wants these six lines in bold. By highlighting the lines and applying the bold character style, the subscripts and superscripts stay in tact.
Nested styles
Similarly, this can also be achieved with Nested styles. Take the last two lines in the last example prior to applying the bold – if I want the ordinal number at the start of the line to be bold, I don’t have to write a GREP style but I can use a nested style such as the one below.
That will give me this result without applying any manual character styles to the text:
There are catches to this technique
The first catch is that the character styles must have the minimal amount of style changes only. That is the sub character style only changes the position of the character to subscript, so that is the only item that style will apply, while maintaining the rest of the paragraph style’s formatting.
The second catch is to be aware of the style hierarchy. The following list is in order of what style overrules another (from most to least dominant):
Local override
Local character style
Nested style
GREP style lowest in list in the paragraph style settings
GREP style highest in list in the paragraph style settings
There can be several advantages to layering character styles by using GREP styles:
Less character styles.
Time saving for commonly formatted items such as ordinal numbers.
Consistency based on GREP patterns for words.
Similarly, there can be drawbacks with this technique:
Looks for particular words or phrases, so not appropriate for instances where dozens of words or phrases may make more GREP styles than are manageable.
Applies to paragraph styles, if used over many paragraph styles, the GREP style needs to be applied repeatedly. Scripts can help with this, such as one I wrote on my scripts page, or GREP Editor from Peter Kahrel.
Can’t take a bold style and italic style and combine them – it can only apply additional attributes that weren’t there previously.
GREP styles (along with live preflight, page thumbnails, dynamic spellcheck and any other service that has to run while the document is being composed) can slow the processing speed of the machine, particularly on larger documents.
In 2016, I developed a concept of creating bar graphs using GREP styles. Put simply, when a number was typed such as 1423, several different GREP styles would kick in to transform the number into a bar graph. In the above example:
if there’s a one for the 1 followed by three digits, make the one character 1000% wide;
If there’s a 4 followed by two digits, make the four character 400% wide;
If there’s a 2 followed by one digit, make the two character 20% wide;
If there’s a 3 as the last character, make the three 3% wide.
To successfully work with any whole number between 1-1999, this technique requires creating 29 different types of GREP styles and character styles. It uses a fixed width font and takes advantage of GREP styles to adjust the width of the numbers to represent them as their appropriate value as a bar graph. I’ve written about this technique in more detail over at InDesignSecrets.
In 2018, I expanded upon this idea and made a script so that anyone wishing to use the technique without typing the 29 character and GREP styles could simply run a script:
Beyond 2000
One catch with this technique is that it stops at 1999 as the character style to represent 2000 can’t be made by creating a 2000% width as the maximum character width is 1000%. However, there is a workaround – create a new character style called 2000, based on the 1000 style, but give it a tracking of 600.
Adjust the GREP graph paragraph style and underneath the 1000% GREPstyle, make a new one using the new 2000% character style that was made and give it the following pattern:
2(?=\d\d\d\b)
To test this, I have
two different GREPgraph styles containing the 1000 figure and have put them
side by side. In the text frame underneath, if I type 2000 into the text frame
with the GREPgraph beyond 2000 style applied to it, it should be the same width,
right?
Absolutely. If I make an additional 3000% character style based on the 2000% style but changed its tracking to 1200, and added a GREPstyle to the paragraph style to apply the 3000% character style to the pattern 3(?=\d\d\d\b), this will work too.
From here, a pattern can now be seen: to get to the next 1000 in width, add another 600 to the tracking of that thousand’s character style and add a new GREP style pattern to the GREPgraph style. This will work until the tracking hits its maximum of 10,000.
Doing all this in less GREP steps
As stated earlier, the original technique required 29 GREP styles to create a GREPgraph, but what if I said it was possible to achieve the numbers 1-1999 (actually a few more – 2047) using 12 GREP styles? This can be done too, but requires a technique in Excel, and that is to convert the original base-10 number into a 16-bit binary number. I’d actually described this technique back in 2011, but it was implemented differently and with more complications: this method is far simpler.
First, convert the desired base-10 number to a 16-bit binary number in Excel using the following formula:
=DEC2BIN(A1/256,8)&DEC2BIN(MOD(A1,256),8)
Now that the number is displayed in binary, copy the binary number into InDesign.
The technique basically works the same way as the original GREPgraph technique but has a slightly different implementation. First, the character styles need to be created that will change the widths, but instead of making 1-9, 10-90, 100-900 and 1000, only the character styles 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024 need to be created. For example, the character style 32 will only contain the width of 32%, and this pattern will apply to the other numbers mentioned.
Zero and 1024 are the
exceptions. Zero will have a character style featuring a .1pt size, no fill or
stroke, and 1% width. 1024 will have a character style of 1000% and a tracking
of 14.
This will create a
total of 12 character styles.
Now to make the paragraph style. To keep it simple, the appearance of the bar graph will controlled by the paragraph rule (though more advanced methods can be made using combinations of rule above, below, underlines and strikethroughs).
Here is where the magic happens – the GREP styles. Here are the styles and how they are implemented in the GREP style panel of the Paragraph style.
And here is the result:
So what’s happening here?
It’s important to understand how binary numbers are written compared to base-10 numbers. The following site gives a really good explanation, and that’s all that’s happening here – the GREP styles are being applied to the 1s in the binary number, based on their position in the binary number, and applying the appropriate GREP widths.
It can go larger
Just like the regular
GREP graph, this too can be expanded to numbers larger than 2000 by creating an
additional character style that has an added tracking applied. In this case, to
represent the numbers 1-4095, a further character style can be added: 2048.
An advantage of this technique is that instead of creating an additional 9 character/GREP styles for each power of 10 using the base-10 GREP styles, the binary method will require a new style every time the total doubles e.g. 14th GREP style would be 4096, 15th GREP style would be 8192…
The obvious disadvantage
with this technique: the numbers to be displayed as bar graphs have to be
written out in binary first.
Is this something I would
use? Probably not myself, as GREPgraphs are normally enough for my purposes,
but I often hear the question “what if you need more than 1999 in a graph” so I
felt that it was worth answering the question: It can be done, but it’s a lot
of effort to get there.
Within the type menu of
Adobe InDesign is the Text Variables feature. This allows users to insert a
special character that will display one of the following items:
A chapter number
A file-related date such
as the creation date, modification date or output date
Filename
Image Name (aka captions
setup)
Last Page Number
Running Header based on
either a used paragraph or character style
Custom static text
Unfortunately, there is an unwanted behaviour of the text variables – InDesign treats them as a single character rather than the actual content within the variable. This has a few unwanted consequences:
Long variables that would
normally break over several lines are squished into one line;
They cannot be formatted
using GREP or Nested styles, nor can specific words be manually selected for
formatting.
It’s an issue that is “in backlog” by the Adobe InDesign team to address, but that was first stated in 2017.
If the issue was resolved, it would have enabled my GREPGraph solution to be applied in the following InDesignSecrets article.
As it turns out, it is also affecting another solution that would make lives easier for anyone who has to create diaries and planners on a regular basis.
The brief:
A planner is created
by making a base template and then creating threaded text for the dates that
are represented only by numbers. This makes populating a diary from week to
week relatively easy…
…until the other material has to be populated, such as what month it is, what term it is, and what week it is. This is best illustrated in the first two minutes of a Youtube video by Rob Cubbon.
Incidentally in Rob’s video, he uses frame breaks between each record, but that isn’t required. Instead, adjust the paragraph style of the numbers by going to the Keep Options and from the Start Paragraph dropdown, select In Next Frame.
The technique:
Instead of populating
the text frames simply with numbers, what if the frames were populated with
more information that can be called upon by running header text variables, such
as the month?
I can make a list in
excel that contains the day of the week and the month in one column. This is
also done without a space intentionally for reasons that will become evident
soon.
I can then copy this text
to my InDesign file. However, note that the text overflows and isn’t correct –
that is because the flowing numbers need to have a character style that will
hide the text that we want to be visible elsewhere. To do this, I’ve created a character
style called hidden, and its properties are:
.1 point high;
1% wide;
No fill or stroke.
That’s fine, but
applying that manually to everything but the numbers will be a nuisance, so the
paragraph style for the numbers has to be modified using Nested Styles.
The nested style will apply a style of [None] to the digits as they need to be visible, but will intentionally hide the month.
So why I am I
intentionally hiding the month? Because I’m only interested in the information
it represents, and this can be called upon by a text variable. I will go to the
master page and insert a text variable for a running header showing me the
first result of hidden on the page.
The issue with the technique
That’s fine until I
get to a spread that contains two months. I’d rather both months be present
rather than the earlier month. For example, I’d like the headline to read
April/May instead of April. I can do this by returning to my master page, apply
my blinking text cursor to the text variable that is already there, type a
slash and then create a new text variable that is a running header looking for
hidden character style in the last instance.
Once I’ve inserted the
variable and returned to that spread, that now looks fine, but all others are
now affected.
I should be able to
make a GREP style that will look for a word, then a backslash, and the same
word it initially found. I’ll create a new text frame with some sample text to
see if it works. The GREP code I’ll use is this:
Apply style: Hidden
GREP: (.+?)\K\/\1
Looks like its working
in my demo, but as I check the document it isn’t… I’ll find a spread where I
know the months split.
But that should work. I saw it work on plain text, why isn’t it working on text variables? That’s because GREP styles and Nested Styles don’t work on text variables. If I want this technique to work, I’ll have to use a workaround.
The workarounds:
Use a script to convert the text variables to plain text. Marijan Tompa used to have such a product via the Adobe Exchange, but it has since been removed, and it is not mine to give away. Other scripts do exist on the Adobe InDesign forums, but they are not as flexible as Marijan’s original script. It also works only one way, and can’t convert the text back to variables.
Don’t attempt to use the GREP style to hide the duplicate month, but instead only add a Running Header for the first instance on a page and add the others manually by overriding the affected master pages;
Create the desired date in Excel using a formula.
The issue with the
first two solutions is that it prevents the solution from remaining live. The
last solution will work but requires in-depth knowledge of Excel and – for many
diaries – requires having an Excel file on stand-by for this purpose.
Ultimately, I’d love to see a fix for this issue as it would open up many possibilities. If you feel that this needs attention now rather than later, please cast your vote here.
The topic of tabs and leaders has been covered on InDesignSecrets before in a 6-part series but it’s worth sharing this particular tip as it saves me plenty of heartache in my day-to-day role.
Usual technique
The usual practice of creating a dotted line (usually for either leading up to a page number in a table of contents OR preparing a space for users to add information to a handwritten form) is often accomplished by the tabs feature. For example:
This is achieved by making
a paragraph style that has a tab stop that has been right-aligned to the end of
the text frame, and in the leader text field of the tab dialog box, a period
has been entered, and it is this period that repeats to generate the dotted
line.
Issues with this technique
However, I find this
is quite restrictive in terms of:
Instead, I prefer to make a character style called “dotted line” giving it the dotted line appearance that I’m after in the underline panel of the character style dialog box.
If more control is
required, I can also prepare a stroke style specifying the dot style and
frequency that the dots appear.
I can then either
apply the character style manually to the areas requiring the dotted lines, or
I can make a paragraph style that calls the dotted line character style using a
GREP style that looks for tab spaces.
Bonus tip
Note that my GREP style is looking for \t|~y rather than just \t – the ~y represents a right indent tab. For dot leaders that need to go to text at the end of a text-frame, I prefer to use a right indent tab instead of setting a right align tab, because if the text frame changes width and I want the right aligned item to remain right aligned to the text frame, I don’t have to adjust the tab stop of the right align tab.
To insert a right indent tab, press SHIFT+TAB. This will work anywhere in a text frame except within a table where it will highlight the previous cell. To apply a right indent tab inside a table, either insert one via right-clicking to call upon the contextual menu, then navigate to Insert Special Characters, Other, then Right Indent Tab.
Otherwise, it can be called upon by opening the quick-apply menu via COMMAND+RETURN on Mac (or CONTROL+RETURN on Windows) and type either Right Indent Tab (or, if you’re really lazy – nt tab as highlighted in pink in the figure below).
In the latest Colecandoo Youtube episode, four Data Merge specific features are covered, namely:
Adding faux-returns to a data merge field to split over lines, and subsequent limitations of this technique;
Using GREP styles to swap a character for a glyph during a Data Merge;
Highlighting field codes so that they are easier to see when not showing live data; and
A bug that occurs when a double-quote is at the start of any field in a Data Merge text file.
Faux returns within a field
The faux-returns technique is written about elsewhere, so rather than spoil their presentations, please read the articles directly from the appropriate sources:
I’m a fan of this trick, but emphasise that this is a workaround rather than a long-term solution, given that formatting is limited and there are more appropriate ways of accomplishing this task such as dedicated plug-ins or an XML workflow.
Swap characters for glyphs
Daniel Solis also features a clever trick to swap phrases with glyphs during a Data Merge that uses both GREP styles and ligatures. Again, rather than simply repeat the technique, please see his original video here.
A similar method can be employed using Indiscripts’ Indyfont script, but rather than swapping phrases with glyphs, will swap single characters.
Highlight Field Codes
The video also shows a method for highlighting field-codes when Data Merge is not in the preview mode. It relies on the [Basic Paragraph] style using a GREP style that contains a large highlight, and that any other styles in the document are based off of the [Basic Paragraph] style. It also means the document has to be styled correctly.
I’d demonstrated this technique following a real-world example of a live file where fields were very hard to see, and the file had to have an offset shell printed with variable data printed afterwards, so making sure the shell had no variable data on it was crucial. Using this technique would make finding the field codes much easier to see.
Double Quote bug
Also featured in the video was an issue that once again arose from a real-world example where a customer had provided a database that had double-quotes at the beginning of fields, but no closing quotes, resulting in rather unusual results.
Since the middle of the year, I’ve been feverishly toiling away on several projects. One has been the Data Merge to single record scripts (which is now available from the Downloads page), and the other has been to create Colecandoo tutorial videos to follow along with the articles that are published on this site.
That said, the Colecandoo Youtube channel has now been created and has several videos on offer at the time of writing:
Two videos showing the Data Merge to single record script in action;
The “Square Peg, Round Hole” GREP style trick;
Using the Chartwell Bars font to move a graphic on X-Y coordinates; and
Swapping paragraphs during a Data Merge.
More content will follow soon, so don’t forget to like and subscribe, and stay tuned!
There’s no doubt that GREP styles are useful, but hiding the GREP style function within the Paragraph Style dialog box makes applying GREP styles difficult:
Previously saved searches made in the find/change dialog box cannot be selected;
GREP styles applied to one paragraph style cannot be easily applied to another existing paragraph style
Perhaps a GREP styles panel would be easier. The panel would be like any other panel available in InDesign, and would list the GREP searches by GREP style names (similar to Paragraph and Character styles). Upon double-clicking a GREP style, a dialog box would open and allow the style to be applied to one or many Paragraph styles at once, what Character style the GREP style should apply, and the ability to load previously saved GREP searches from the find/change dialog box (where appropriate).
Great huh? Well, there isn’t one. Perhaps enough people requesting such a panel on Adobe’s wishlist page might persuade the developers at Adobe make one… perhaps fix the footnotes feature at the same time – hint, hint!
Well, until the software developers at Adobe create such a panel, the next best thing is to use workarounds or third party solutions provided in the form of javascripts.
Map GREP styles from one Paragraph Style to one or many Paragraph styles:
A combination of two scripts by separate contributors on the Adobe Forums allowed what I had not thought possible to become possible – select a paragraph style with the desired GREP styles, and then select multiple destination paragraph styles for the GREP styles to be applied. The script can be found here.
Similarly useful GREP style utilities
Peter Kahrel has a page dedicated to his various GREP utilities. Apart from having many GREP tools, his utilities accomplish other GREP style tasks, such as:
Ability to map a newly created (or saved search) to one or many paragraph styles with a specific character style.
Ability to highlight the results of a GREP search in real time.
Marijan Tompa (aka Tomaxxi) has two GREP scripts, but of interest is TomaxxiGREP. This script presents a panel that shows what GREP styles are applied to highlighted text, and gives real-time ability to change the search code and character style of the GREP style without opening the Paragraph Styles panel.
General GREP assistance
Roland Dreger has a script that highlights the results of a GREP search in real-time in a similar fashion to Peter Kahrel’s GREP editor.
Jongware has a dedicated GREP help page and a script titled “whatthegrep” that takes a GREP search and shows in layman’s terms what is being searched for.
InDesignSecrets website has a dedicated page to providing information about GREP.
Virtuosi Media‘s website provided this gem that contains long GREP chains to find specific items such as date formats or, country postcodes.
The Data Merge feature of InDesign is great for merging text, but cannot take the text and parse it into a graph or a chart. This feature may be available through plug-ins purchased separately to Creative Suite/Cloud, but having the ability to create data merge projects that feature variable graphs or charts using only InDesign would be welcomed by many users.
In 2011, this site provided a proof of principle that pie charts and bar graphs could in fact be created via InDesign, Excel and Illustrator. Those interested can see those articles here and here.
Despite proving a point, the technique had several flaws:
The Excel files contained many formulas that were very complicated for the average user and likely to cause problems if the original database was replaced at any time;
The appearance of the graphs were limited to the graphics created in Illustrator, meaning any changes to the appearance of the graphs were complicated;
With the setup of the placed images used to make the charts, only one kind of graph could be merged at once.
It would be almost a year until InDesignSecrets co-host David Blatner wrote this piece concerning a solution using the FF Chartwell font created by the FontFont foundry:
Prior to this post, the FF Chartwell font had been considered as a solution but after reading David’s article, the issue was revisited. Reading the instructions for the FF Chartwell font looked promising, and the decision was made to bite the bullet and purchase the font.
Using the font (full instructions are available with the purchase of the font but can also be found here and this video here) has several advantages over my previous solutions:
Easy to set up;
The same data can presented using different charts in the same data merge record;
The appearance of the chart can take advantage of GREP styles, Nested styles, and the effects dialog box;
PDF processing time is faster with smaller size PDFs as a result.
There are some limitations that should be spelled out prior to a purchase of this font:
Most charts represent figures from 0-100. This is fine for percentile charts such as pie, rose, ring or radar charts, but limits the use of bar and line graphs;
While the font allows a pie graph to turn into a donut, be aware that the hole is made using a fill colour rather than being transparent;
The data in the charts must be integers (e.g. whole numbers, no fractions) and this means rounding results up or down accordingly. For percentile charts it is also important to make sure the total of figures in the data adds up to 100.
Tweaks or hacks to further improve the charts
There is a bar graph that represents figures from 0-1,000; but the graph appears from left to right and starts with a diamond shape. For those wanting a usual bar chart, here is the workaround.
Use the Chartwell bars font to represent the number between 0-1000, and format according to the Chartwell instructions; but change the fill/stroke of the font to none.
In the paragraph palette, select paragraph rules and then select above line to the size of the text, using whatever size is felt necessary.
Now that the chart displays as rectangular start/finish bars, change the rotation of the textbox that contains the chart to 90 degrees rotation.
A similar solution can be used when using a segmented bar graph, but instead of using the paragraph palette, use the character palette to create individual underlines for each segment. This can be further improved upon using GREP styles.
The illustration below was a bar graph using a paragraph style that had both above and below strokes, and the bottom has been clipped by putting the text box into its own frame.
To make a piechart have a true donut hole rather than a solid circular fill (as shown in the picture below) follow these steps:
Draw a circle the size of the desired hole and place it where the hole has to appear in the pie chart. Give this hole a paper fill and using the effects palette, set the opacity to 0%
Select both the drawn circle and textbox that contains the pie chart and group them
From the effects palette, check the checkbox that says “Knockout Group”
The find/change dialog box is a useful tool in InDesign until many searches need to be done at once. For example, an imported word processor file contains double spaces, double returns, spaces at the start of lines etc that need to be tidied. Using solely find/change, each item needs to be found and changed before the next item can be found and changed, meaning typing in the find field, then the change field, then change (or change all). This applies to GREP searches as well.
Ultimately, is there a way to perform many find/changes to text at once? Luckily, the answer is yes, there are several. Will they also change more than the text (such as formatting), not all methods outlined will do this. Some solutions listed below are still in Beta testing, while others may or may not work with Creative Cloud. Links to the providers of each solution has been provided for those seeking more information.
First method – default script (with outside assistance)
There is a script that ships with InDesign called findchangebylist.jsx. This script runs many find/change commands that are stored as text in another file called FindChangeList.txt.
By changing specific lines in the script and making and renaming copies of the FindChangeList.txt file, many different “chained searches” can be made and stored for later use.
Because the code used in the FindChangeList.txt file is rather cody, scripter Kasyan Servetsky has created a script that will take whatever is in the find/change dialog box and turn it into code that can be cut and pasted into the FindChangeList.txt file.
For regular visitors to this site, this article may seem like déjà vu, and that is because this solution has been discussed on Colecandoo before:
This solution does not have a user interface but rather works in a similar fashion to InDesign’s default script but uses Fabian’s own expression language.
This plug-in has a user interface and what the find/change dialog box in InDesign should really have shipped by default. Nevertheless it is cheaper than a slab of beer and will last much much longer.
While still in the Beta stage, Rorohiko is attempting to make what is arguably missing from the InDesign menu: the Actions palette. Other than running find/change commands, this extension allows much more chaining and automation of other non-text based tasks, but at the time of writing is still too early to tell.
After a recent post discussing the complications of indexing a rather large InDesign file (1600+pp), it is worth mentioning another issue encountered with the project, namely the reduced speed of InDesign.
There are already several articles concerning “slowdowns” while working with InDesign, namely:
Put simply, the larger the file became, the harder it was to work on. Little things such as placing the text cursor between words resulted in a spinning beachball of death for five minutes before the cursor once again became a text cursor.
Disabling several features in InDesign made the file somewhat workable:
1. Display performance – to these settings :
2. Pages panel – turn off the preview for the actual pages:
3. Turn the preflight panel off:
4. Live screen drawing – never:
5. Dynamic spelling off:
6. Do not use GREP styles or Nested styles
7. Do not use index entries or cross references
While this made the file workable, it was at the expense of the good features of InDesign. The slowdown was to the stage where using a word processor to accomplish the same task was considered!
Within the preferences, there is no ability to control the amount of RAM reserved for InDesign to use, nor is there the ability to control how often InDesign autosaves to its backup… something that is possibly slowing InDesign down even further.
Some of the features of InDesign were not necessary for this task as the project was completely black text supplied by the client, so having a lower quality display performance without seeing the page previews was not an issue. Preflight was not a concern with this particular file given that it was black text within one rather long text-frame and the spelling was to remain as the client provided the artwork.
Initially there was concern that turning GREP styles off would limit the control of “runt lines”. GREP styles had also been used for formatting of particular words, but because no type was going to be added, performing a one-off find/replace using the relevant GREP was able to remove the need for GREP styles. It was amazing to see the difference in speed when the file had the GREP styles turned on, opposed to when they were not applied – in this project the GREP styles were a major contributing factor to the file’s slow performance.
Followers of this blog will be familiar with several GREP styles that have been used to correct names or details within variable data campaigns. After this experience, it would appear that GREP styles are better suited to projects where content will be added dynamically (such as a Data Merged file) or constant alterations need to be made; rather than static documents – especially where no new content will be added.
The project DID have to be indexed (as discussed in a previous post) and found that once the file was indexed, the speed of the file slowed to a crawl.
A recent project involved creating an enormous index… in fact there were over 100,000 index entries to create.
Creating index entries is normally a chore. To create just one index entry, the normal procedure is to:
Highlight the text to be indexed
Select “New Page Reference” from the index palette (or command + 7)
Enter the details and click Add (or Add All) then OK
In a normal book, indexing is something that is done carefully by the author or staff dedicated to the task – entries in the index often refer to certain instances of a word rather than every instance of its use. This project however used the index as a lookup table instead, so the more advanced features of the index palette (e.g. see also references, index levels) were not necessary.
For this project, the items to be indexed were restaurant names. The name appeared in the same line as the description, so using a Paragraph Style to identify the item for an index entry could not be used. However, the restaurant names DID have a Character Style associated with them.
Because there were 100,000 index entries in this book and each entry had its own character style, there were easier methods to perform this task. There are several scripts online that can create index entries from character styles:
Peter Kahrel’s version – allows entries in one or many character styles to be added to an index;
Joshua Hubber’s version – allows entries in one character style only to be added to an index, but can apply this to a all open documents as well;
Kerntiff’s Quickindex – allows entries in one character style or paragraph style only to be added to an index – has a user interface to see what will be indexed
For this project, because there were two character styles used to identify the restaurant names, I used Peter Kahrel’s script. While testing the script on a sample chapter, everything appeared to work correctly… it took time but all the names in character styles were added to the index.
However, when the time came to apply this script to a document 1,628 pages long, the script would run, and then the spinning beach-ball of death would appear. Assuming I was not allowing the script enough time to finish its tasks, an attempt was made to let the script run over a weekend on the fastest machine in the office. Sadly, this did not work. Put simply, there were just too many entries for the machine to handle.
Enter Textwrangler…
Luckily, all the text for this project, while many pages long, was all in one text frame. This provided the option to enter the index entries while the document was in a raw text format. To do this, the text was exported as an Adobe InDesign tagged text file by placing the cursor anywhere in the text and selecting File/Export (command + E).
The newly saved text file was then opened in Textwrangler. The a find/change using Textwrangler’s GREP was then made for the following:
If the code is hard to see in the picture, here is the type:
Once the changes in the text files were saved, the type was imported in place of the old text in the InDesign file, and within moments the document was completely indexed as required.
The only other part that took time was to run the “Generate Index” function from InDesign itself, and considering the amount of index entries in the document, took an hour to generate.
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