It’s a red-letter day at Smith Controls

This blog originally appeared in 2010. It has been updated with fresh information.

I’ve been studying and practicing GREP functions for about three years now, and I have to say I’m getting pretty good at it! I keep my various cheat-sheets handy when practicing GREP, but I find it to be one of the most delightfully geeky things that you can do in Adobe InDesign.

I love little GREP challenges, like turning a list of names from first-name-first to last-name-first, which is delightfully simple using GREP (I demonstrated this in an earlier blog).

My challenge this week was a large block of text in an InDesign document where the company wanted their name converted to small caps every time it appeared in text. You can do this with Character Styles as you type, or by selecting the text after it is in the InDesign document, but that’s slow and tedious, and you might miss one.

Step One is to create a Character Style whose only function is to set Case to Small Caps.

So, I set-up a Character Style whose only function is to make the Case of the type Small Caps (in this demonstration I added red color also). To apply this Character Style to a paragraph or larger selection of type, I created a Paragraph Style with all the other characteristics of the text, and then added a GREP Style function to the Paragraph Style.

This allows me to apply this Paragraph Style to an entire document, and the GREP Style will be applied to everything.

Step Two is to create a Paragraph Style with all of your typographic settings, and add a GREP command to that style, calling for the specific text to have the Small Caps Character Style applied. This will automatically apply small caps to the specific text.

This function has been in InDesign since CS3, but is little-known, and seldom-applied. I think a lot of people could use this, if they but knew it was there.

About a decade ago, while working as a contractor for Eastman Kodak Company, I produced a book for them which (they insisted) had to have the word KODAK in all-caps every time it appeared in print (at first they wanted me to put the little ® after it every time, but I talked them out of that). The book I had written had been through several torturous rounds of vetting by the legal beagles and the public relations team, and I had a tight deadline. I used search-and-replace, carefully, to catch every possible instance of Kodak and turn it into KODAK.

With the GREP Style function in InDesign, I could have done it in seconds, applying the change to the entire book with one quick edit of my Paragraph Style.

Here is the finished text, with small caps applied. I did nothing except add the GREP command to the paragraph style, and InDesign did the rest. This was set in InDesign 5.5, which behaves the same as its predecessor with GREP.

Warning! Changing a word from U&lc to Small Caps might change the line-fall or the pagination of the entire document, so be sure to look at every page of your document to be sure that this little trick does not cause a virtual text explosion.

For more on GREP styling, I recommend reading a number of sources. The best is an e-book from O’Reilly publishers called GREP In InDesign CS5 by Peter Kahrel. Mr. Kahrel has written an easy-to-implement guide to GREPping, and it has been at my right hand for months. I love it. The other places to look for information about GREP searching and styling are InDesign Secrets, and the InDesigner.com site. Both have excellent resources on GREP.

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I’m writing a new book about printing processes and prepress. Click on the link below to give me your e-mail address, and I will let you know when the book is published (target date is March, 2012).

About Brian Lawler

Brian Lawler is an Emeritus Professor of Graphic Communication at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and was a Guest Professor at Hochschule München from September, 2021 to September, 2022. He writes about graphic arts processes and technologies for various industry publications, and on his blog, The Blognosticator.
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One Response to It’s a red-letter day at Smith Controls

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