Find / Change in InDesign

Image for Find / Change in InDesign

Searching with TEXT

Image for Find / Change in InDesign

Searching with GREP

The find/change feature of InDesign is your best friend! Here are a few tips about using it...

There are 2 basic modes that are going to help you to make global changes throughout the text.

Wth the TEXT mode we can find text and change to something else or possibly change to a different style... 

With the GREP mode we can find a pattern in the text and modify this text in various ways.

furthermore...

Text

In this mode you are simply searching for the occurence of a piece of text and replacing with something else. In the first image here, you will see that I am replacing FAIRY with Fairy. Because I am changing the case, I need to switch on the Case Sensitive button (ringed).

GREP

General Regular Expressions are a way of finding a pattern in text. This is very powerful and narrows down our search to particular locations or repeatable patterns.

In this example I want to find the word Oberon but only where is exists at the beginning of a paragraph. With the GREP tab enabled the fly-out menus include such switches as locations>start of paragraph. This gives you the ^ symbol. If you know GREP, then you can type these symbols directly. We then replace this with the 'found text' but we can then change the format (in this case the paragraph style previously prepared).

You may find that you can complete changes all in one routine. On the other hand, you may need to replace items through more than one step. An example may be that your character names are not in a separate paragraph. In this case, you need to take 2 steps:

  1. find text: ^OBERON
    replace with: Oberon\r
  2. find ^Oberon
    replace with: $0 (and change paragraph style to 'oberon')

When you want to change a word or line that contains words, you can be prepared first by creating the style. On the other hand, it is also possible to create the new style from the 'change style' drop down menu.

Posted on 09 Mar around 5pm

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