![]() Anything already formatted with All Caps isn’t affected by the change to lower case. ![]() Select the list and change it all to lower case manually. Acronyms are easy to find/change using GREP, but if there were many proper nouns this method could be more trouble than it’s worth. If you don’t mind using All Caps, I’ve made this simple routine work on test text.įirst, protect any acronyms and proper nouns with All Caps (possibly using a character style that can be replaced later). So it probably isn’t an oversight so much as a practical impossibility. My tentative guess is that recording actions in InDesign would call for so much “recognition” on the part of the program that it would be much more difficult to arrange than in Photoshop (say). But was the relevant thing you did the replacement of a capital letter with the same letter in lower case, or was it the replacement of any old character with an ‘a’? If you change a capital ‘A’ to a lower case ‘a’, and tell the program to “do that again, on your own this time”, it has to “recognize” the relevant thing you did, so it can imitate it. With a script, you “pull the strings” of the program in such a way that it has no choice over what to do, so it doesn’t have to “recognize” what’s relevant and what isn’t. It has to recognize which “moves” are relevant. With an action, you make the “moves” you want the program to make, then you tell it to do the same thing on its own. The difference between an action and a script is a bit like the difference between a dance instructor and a puppeteer. The result looks exactly the same as the original, except for the changes we made: Seems like there must be a way to do both these steps with one GREP query (basically, make the first one leave in the punctuation for those paragraphs that need it), but my Monday-morning brain isn’t finding one.Īnyway, the important thing is that after I’m done, I just need to save the text file, go back to InDesign, delete the text that was there, and use File > Place to import the modified tagged text back in. So I’ll run a second GREP query to add those periods back in: The only problem is that I’ve removed the periods at the end of the bullet items that needed them (the ones that contain a second sentence in the line. ![]() When I click Change All, it does it’s magic. Be sure to read the Help files for whatever program you’re using!) This is another example of how different flavors of GREP work slightly differently. (Note that TextWrangler is using backslash-number instead of the dollarsign-number code that InDesign uses. I replace it with the original paragraph style codes (\1), then use the \l code that converts the following character to lowercase, then insert the rest of the line of text (\2\3\4), leaving out the period at the end if one had been there. Which searches for any string of text that starts with the “list” paragraph style tag, followed by a single uppercase character, followed by any string of text, ending with any lowercase character that may or may not be followed by a period at the end of the paragraph. Warning: There are likely more elegant and optimized ways to write the GREP codes feel free to note your favorite ways of doing this in the comments below. ![]() Now we open the Find/Change dialog box, turn on the GREP checkbox, and type in some code. On the Mac that should probably be BBEdit or its free (but very powerful little sister) TextWrangler:Īll the paragraphs are tagged with the paragraph styles, so it’s easy to search for paragraphs that start with our “list” style. Now open that text file in a text editor that has a GREP feature. So choose File > Export, then choose InDesign Tagged Text from the Format pop-up menu. The answer, of course, is InDesign Tagged Text. The trick is to export your text in a file format that can be manipulated by GREP (text only) while also being able to re-import it without losing all your formatting. We want to make all the characters at the beginning of the list items lower case and remove the period when present. Note that some paragraphs end with a period and others don’t. Here’s my original text, formatted with automatic bullets (using a paragraph style called List): There are others, including some that can convert case. But InDesign just uses one flavor of GREP. So today the answer remains: No, you can’t do this in InDesign. As some bullet points contain several sentences, it would need to omit the full stops and capitalised sentences within the paragraphs. It would also be nice to remove the full stop at the end of the bullet point. I have 300 pages that I want to change the first character of a bullet point to lowercase. In the comments to that post, jezabellabingbong wrote: As I mentioned back in this earlier post, InDesign’s GREP feature lacks the ability to convert found text from upper to lower case (or vice versa).
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