Find/Change is such an important time saver in InDesign that I dedicated an entire chapter of the Compendium to it. There you will find the following examples reiterated, along with some other examples as well. I also provide some additional resources, especially for grep searches.
Long ago, when I had the honor of running the Seattle InDesign User Group (the world’s first!), I was given the list of the approximately 800 members it had at the time. Like the first list of names on page 9, the list I had was not written with last names first nor was it alphabetized. I knew of a fast way to sort the names alphabetically once they were formatted correctly, but I had to get the last names, or surnames, first. So I did my first GREP Find/Change.
There is a description of our query’s logic on page 8. In short, we need a way to bring the last chunk of letters in each paragraph (presumably a surname) to the beginning of the paragraph and insert a comma after that chunk. Delimiting “chunks” in the GREP Find What field is done with parentheses. To move those chunks around in the Change To field requires us to reference them by the order in which they’re found (“$1” for the first chunk, “$2” for the second, etc.). Thus:
See page 8 (and the Compendium) for a translation of that and…
Feels pretty good, eh? Recall that I had 50 times as many names suddenly formatted properly. That’s when I realized I wanted to get to know grep better.
To sort the list, we’ll use a script. Scripts are bits of programming, most often in JavaScript, that extend what InDesign can do. Although I am not going to cover JavaScript scripting in this book, there are many resources for those interested in learning that skill. A web search for “InDesign scripting” will yield the best ones quickly.
But InDesign comes with some sample scripts that come in handy once in a while. We’ll use the one to sort paragraphs alphabetically.
A script may perform many operations, possibly hundreds. Undoing those can be time-consuming. So I always save before using a script so that, if it fails me, I can use File > Revert to get back to the last saved state quickly.
Many fonts come with more glyphs than some users realize. There may be many glyphs of a particular character (a handwriting font may have many versions of an “e,” for example). There might also be ornaments and swashes. But how do we type them? In InDesign, we look in the Glyphs panel, find the glyph we want, then double-click it. It is then inserted where our cursor has been blinking.
But there’s another feature that involves the Glyphs panel and glyphs in general: finding one glyph and replacing it with another.
The Glyphs panel has a Show menu that limits which characters you are shown. The font currently in use does not possess any ornaments, or that would be a choice in the Show menu.
It may be hard to see in longer lists. Alternately, you can choose a font that contains nothing but ornaments, like the classic Zapf Dingbats.
Optimally, objects, like the shapes we draw in InDesign, will be formatted with object styles. Sometimes we forget to use them, or sometimes an object gets disassociated from its style. So, for some reason, we can be left with many objects whose appearance we’d like to change quickly.
If the objects to be changed have some attribute(s) they share with each other, but that are not shared with anything else in the document, we can use Find/Change. This is the case for the objects on the right side of page 9. They all have a 5-point stroke weight and nothing else in the document does.