GREP. It's absolutely vital.

[Beemo8Bit]

It stumps me why Affinity doesn't have GREP for paragraph styles yet. I really want to switch from InDesign, but that's impossible without GREP. I lay out complex books, and it's not practical to manually style paragraphs on every page of a 200,300,400 page book. For example, telling a body text paragraph style to apply capitalisation and a colour to any text up to a colon, in a paragraph. I see so many people asking for GREP styling. It's not a niche thing, it's absolutely vital to convenient book layout for many people. When you add it, I will buy it.

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, Beemo8Bit said:

For example, telling a body text paragraph style to apply capitalisation and a colour to any text up to a colon, in a paragraph.

Isn't this already implemented?

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

Isn't this already implemented?

 

Yes, using the Initial Words settings in the Paragraph Text Style.

[Old Bruce]

8 hours ago, Beemo8Bit said:

. For example, telling a body text paragraph style to apply capitalisation and a colour to any text up to a colon, in a paragraph.

 

6 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Isn't this already implemented?

Yes.

5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Yes, using the Initial Words settings in the Paragraph Text Style.

No need to use the Initial Words, just search for

(.+:)   With the Paragraph Style "body text"

Replace it with 

\1  And the colour you want.

I can do it for the entire document, or a section, or a selection.

[Beemo8Bit]

On 5/1/2025 at 5:41 PM, Old Bruce said:

....

Yes.

....

No need to use the Initial Words, just search for

(.+:)   With the Paragraph Style "body text"

Replace it with 

\1  And the colour you want.

I can do it for the entire document, or a section, or a selection.

This is interesting and useful. The problem is, I need it only apply if it finds a colon, and only up to the colon. If I use :, it just applies it to every paragraph, even if there's no colon. Is there a way around this?

 

There are still issues around GREP as far as I can see. For example, I can't prevent runts, or capitalise specific words automatically in my body text style. I don't want to manually do a find and replace for that sort of thing if I can help it. Just examples.

 

Thanks

 

---------------------------------------

[GarryP]

On 5/1/2025 at 8:59 AM, Beemo8Bit said:

For example, telling a body text paragraph style to apply capitalisation and a colour to any text up to a colon, in a paragraph.

No GREP necessary, just a new Character Style and a modified Paragraph Style, as suggested by Walt above – see attached image and document.

If you do it with Text Styles then it's done automatically for any paragraphs which use the Paragraph Style.

NoGrepNeeded.afpub

Edited May 2 by GarryP
Added document.

[walt.farrell]

18 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

No need to use the Initial Words, just search for

(.+:)   With the Paragraph Style "body text"

Replace it with 

\1  And the colour you want.

I can do it for the entire document, or a section, or a selection.

Yes, you can do that with Find and Replace. The point from this (and other similar requests) is that some applications support regular-expression functions directly in the Text Styles, which makes such manual searching unnecessary. And it ensures that as the document changes the text-formatting is updated automatically whether you remember to search/replace or not.

But for this particular request, Initial Words suffice, and the power of a regular-expression-based Text Styles is not needed.

[matisso]

On 5/1/2025 at 9:59 AM, Beemo8Bit said:

It stumps me why Affinity doesn't have GREP for paragraph styles yet. I really want to switch from InDesign, but that's impossible without GREP. I lay out complex books, and it's not practical to manually style paragraphs on every page of a 200,300,400 page book.

It’s impossible without a whole number of other, often really fundamental features and you will find out the hard way (pray you don’t). My personal advice, if you’ve got a good Adobe deal (their subscriptions are negotiable to a degree, unless you’ve got an old perpetual licence then that’s even better), stick to InDesign, especially since you mention you work is complex. Sadly, and I really mean it, Publisher is still nowhere near the same league. If you add InDesign scripting capability (which is still in development in Affinity and no one knows when it’s going to be available), the number of quality scripts for it that can be found, free and paid, its value increases even more.

Yes, you can get professional-looking results in Publisher (I’m curious though, if anyone has used it for such big documents as yours). But this will cost you a lot lot more elbow grease and frustration working around its inexplicable limitations. And there go your savings.

[Bound by Beans]

37 minutes ago, matisso said:

But this will cost you a lot lot more elbow grease and frustration working around its inexplicable limitations. And there go your savings.

Exactly – given the time costs today in terms of time and material, the monthly Adobe subscription pays for itself when time is spent on workarounds or limitations. If Serif doesn’t improve Publisher, there’s no business case for the software – neither financially nor in terms of features. Publisher will end up like a playful version of MS Publisher, only with Canva making it.

It’s so obvious that the regular members here have little understanding of the processes a book like @Beemo8Bit goes through in an InDesign setup, or the kind of economics involved in a professional commercial setup. Unfortunately, Serif has yet to realize that they are positioning Publisher in a market where the offering still falls short of professional customers’ actual needs.

[Old Bruce]

9 hours ago, GarryP said:

If you do it with Text Styles then it's done automatically for any paragraphs which use the Paragraph Style.

 

Here is a screenshot of a couple of Paragraphs that I edited the text only. One does not have a : and the other does have a : but it is too far away. The request was for the text from the beginning of the paragraph up to the : to be Capitalized and coloured. I assumed that there was another requirement, that if there was no : then the Capitalization and colouring would not take place.

NoGrepNeeded bruce fail.afpub

9 hours ago, Beemo8Bit said:

This is interesting and useful. The problem is, I need it only apply if it finds a colon, and only up to the colon. If I use :, it just applies it to every paragraph, even if there's no colon. Is there a way around this?

All I can say is it worked perfectly for me. 

Find:

(.+:)   With Body Text chosen for the Paragraph Style.

Replace:

\1  With Colour and Capitalization chosen in the Format.

[GarryP]

13 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I assumed that there was another requirement, that if there was no : then the Capitalization and colouring would not take place.

I see now that they gave that requirement in a later post.

If they have paragraphs without colons then they can format those with a Paragraph Style without the Initial Words formatting, possibly using the ‘no Initial Words’ Paragraph Style as a Base for the ‘with Initial Words’ Paragraph Style to make changes to both easier to make later.

It’s also easy to increase the “Max word count” to accommodate more text before the colon.

I don’t know if it would be possible to use the Find/Replace functionality to search the paragraphs and automatically apply those Paragraph Styles as needed, without doing it manually paragraph-by-paragraph, which might make things easier.

(I'm not suggesting that any of this is a 'perfect method' for the requirements, I'm just saying what can be done.)

[Beemo8Bit]

Thanks for everyone's input. I gave the trial a go, but Affinity is not there yet for me, so it's InDesign for now. For interest's sake, I lay out roleplaying game manuals. So you're looking at hundreds of pages with pretty much all of the complex requirements layout can ask for. I couldn't do it without proper GREP functionality built into paragraph styles. Other that that, Affinity Publisher does seem pretty cool, and I'll be monitoring it until I can do the switchover.

[Fantomas.CZ]

On 5/1/2025 at 1:29 PM, walt.farrell said:

Yes, using the Initial Words settings in the Paragraph Text Style.

Not the "to the colon" part. 

And also, going through the pains of entering the complete text, then search and replace, then going through the text again to do the final typesetting is by far not equal to GREP styles simply changing the style right away. Not to mention that if you want to add something, you then need to do the search and replace again, and pray that it doesn't mess up something on page 379 and twelve similar places, half of which you'll never see. 

Although using search and replace is possible, it is by far NOT as practical as GREP styles. 

[PaoloT]

1 hour ago, Fantomas.CZ said:

Not the "to the colon" part. 

Yet, it looks exactly as it works.

 

[walt.farrell]

13 hours ago, Fantomas.CZ said:

Not the "to the colon" part

Yes, even "to the colon". Here's a screenshot from my iPad (but the desktop is similar) showing that setting in the built-in Initial Words Text Style. 

 

[Bound by Beans]

GREP offers freedom – extreme freedom – for automating styling through pattern-based text formatting, and is therefore an enormous time-saver. And so on, and so on. The presence of this tiny example in styling options is no consolation.

It is precisely Publisher that stands in need of this flexibility and automation for its users – because serious professionals require it.

These are the kinds of demands professionals have for software: that it can automate and save time – something you simply fail to grasp. And by the time you eventually do, AI will be even further ahead in assisting with automation, including generating GREP patterns for users.

Meanwhile, you define styles as if you had all the time in the universe. Comical.

I hope Canva brings a modern perspective to solving this customer need — one that must be addressed for a significant part of the market to open up.

[Fantomas.CZ]

On 5/7/2025 at 12:40 PM, walt.farrell said:

Yes, even "to the colon". Here's a screenshot from my iPad (but the desktop is similar) showing that setting in the built-in Initial Words Text Style. 

Oh yes, you are right! 

I have another use case, which is easily solved by GREP styles, but not by anything offered by APu currently, and that is forced unbreakable spaces between a single-letter preposition (that is not "a", where a line break is permissible). I believe it could be added into the paragraph manager, but so far this hasn't happened yet, as well as other non-English specific topics like hyphenation on iPad etc. It's a shame, that Affinity so much ignores non-English creators...

[Alfred]

On 5/7/2025 at 11:40 AM, walt.farrell said:

Here's a screenshot from my iPad (but the desktop is similar)

It’s worthwhile investigating the annotation tools offered by the iPad screenshot facility. They’re super simple to use, and you can get much neater results.