Comments on Tips & Techniques: An InDesign GREP tutorial

@gmoeller54: Tab length is a "formatting"...

2010-01-18T15:01:42.824-06:00

@gmoeller54: Tab length is a "formatting" function, and you can definitely include this in the find/change. To do this, create a Paragraph Style containing the Tab Stop attributes that you want (.25", etc.). Then, in the Find/Change dialog box, just leave ^t in the "Change to:" field, then click on the "More Options" button. Click on the magnifying glass icon to the right of the "Change Format" field, and choose the Paragraph Style you created in the "Style Options" category.

In other words, you can search for a character (5 spaces in your case), and replace it with another character (a tab character) along with some formatting specified by a Paragraph Style.

Hi there... I am trying to replace spaces that I a...

2010-01-16T16:47:40.717-06:00

Hi there...
I am trying to replace spaces that I am using find to detect (find will detect spaces simply by hitting the space bar) and then replace them with a tab.
I can successfully accomplish this by adding ^t to every found instance of 5 spaces, however, I would like the tab to be .25 long. Is there a way to specify tab length along with ^t in find?

Like you, my example with ? was "strict"...

2009-12-02T17:08:40.946-06:00

Like you, my example with ? was "strict". It was OK only for the last paragraph of a story. That is why, I thought about others "cas".
1) The last paragraph followed by a paragraph without bullet
2) One paragraph with bullet and tab inside.
(have a look here http://laurent.tournier.free.fr/bullet_tab.jpg)
To select both, I found this regex :
((?<=~8)|(?<=\t))([^~8\t\r])+

Best
Laurent

Thanks for the comment, Laurent. Yes, my GREP stri...

2009-12-02T11:40:13.150-06:00

Thanks for the comment, Laurent. Yes, my GREP string is "strict", meaning that it will only find a tab, followed by one or more non-tab and non-bullet characters, followed by a bullet. So if there is a tab near the end of the story without a following bullet, it will not match from the tab to the end of the story...it "needs" the bullet.

However, adding the ? (which means "zero or more times" at the end, as you suggest, means that it will wrongly match a tab followed by one or more non-tab and non-bullet characters followed by a tab.

Hello, Good tips. The end of the regex can, perha...

2009-12-02T11:27:03.352-06:00

Hello,

Good tips. The end of the regex can, perhaps, be completed with ? (?=~8?) to find a paragrah beginning by a bullet followed by a tabulation, but not necessary followed by another paragraph with a bullet, ie the last paragraph.
Laurent Tournier
www.indigrep.com