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23 hours ago, Zbigg said:

GREP is necessary for anything more.

What do you have in mind as 'anything'?

I'd appreciate GREP in text styles.
Since it exists in Find & Replace, may it be that 'just' UI design is missing rather than programming?

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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51 minutes ago, thomaso said:

I'd appreciate GREP in text styles.
Since it exists in Find & Replace, may it be that 'just' UI design is missing rather than programming?

Well, "UI design" requires programming, too.

But more importantly, performing RegEx processing automatically as text is added, or as Text Styles are created or modified, in order to try to figure out if there's some Text Style that should be automatically applied, definitely takes programming not just additional UI design. It also requires additional UI design, of course :)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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22 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But more importantly, performing RegEx processing automatically as text is added, or as Text Styles are created or modified, in order to try to figure out if there's some Text Style that should be automatically applied, definitely takes programming not just additional UI design. It also requires additional UI design, of course 

This part is done already ;)

There are tiny creatures working all time 24/7 observing your user actions in Affinity. The most obviously GREP related daemon is the one which grasps (greps;) if you type text after "."
:ph34r:

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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1 minute ago, thomaso said:

The most obviously GREP related daemon is the one which grasps (greps;) if you type text after "."

Good point about autocorrect, but I'm not convinced it's based on regular expression processing. Still, it's very similar and could be extended, I'm sure.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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8 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not convinced it's based on regular expression processing

Does it matter? A well working code exists in Affinity. You worry about its source?

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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33 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

...I'm not convinced it's based on regular expression processing...

It is.

In fact, when I do use grep in p.styles, I usually first use ID's grep find/change to go through a bit of text to make sure what really is being trapped, what will be caught, before using the expression in a p style.

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On 1/25/2020 at 1:23 AM, MikeW said:

It is.

In fact, when I do use grep in p.styles, I usually first use ID's grep find/change to go through a bit of text to make sure what really is being trapped, what will be caught, before using the expression in a p style.

Thats also true.

Alongside, working on some larger publication, you need constant check&correction /eg orphan&widow/ etc.

cheers,

AF Photo+Designer+Publisher and their betas on Win10 x64/Gtx760+AmdFX+24GB RAM

 

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On 1/24/2020 at 3:46 PM, walt.farrell said:

Good point about autocorrect, but I'm not convinced it's based on regular expression processing. Still, it's very similar and could be extended, I'm sure.

Walt, in helping someone today solve a formatting issue, I created the below grep style. The need was to take email addresses that were all lower case with the first/last names separated by a period, like so:

john.doe@company.com
george.doofus@gmail.com

And make the first letter of the first/last names capitalized. Shown below in ID as a grep style, top lines are a different paragraph style...

Capture_000421.png.ada4b6b74a3f79d3a33f78bd344d367f.png

Now, I personally would have done a grep find/change, but using it as a grep style made it "one and done."

 

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5 hours ago, MikeW said:

Now, I personally would have done a grep find/change, but using it as a grep style made it "one and done."

... and a GREP style not only does F&R once but also does it for any further text which gets edited or added at a later moment. You also can transfer a GREP style to different formatting (styles) and even to other documents.

So, very different to F&R, a GREP style is a saved F&R action and gets automatically and permanently re-applied, while it is active only for paragraphs which have it applied – not to the entire text of a document, like F&R does.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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On 10/9/2019 at 12:09 PM, Seneca said:

Those who never used GREP styles will never understand how much a time saver this is.

I use them all the time and it's not the same as running F/R.

I have a weekly publication to do and headings in those periodicals consist of 2 parts. The main heading followed by sources.

When I hit the tab the sources get sent to the right of the column, get italicised, etc. All done because of a GREP. they act like triggers.

Another scenario. Copying text to inDesign template automatically formats those headers without me doing anything.

I don't have to worry and remember that I should run F/R on it. It's done. Even better, GREP can add left and right brackets to whose sources or remove them, depending not the periodical. A lot of text I get is shared with other periodicals. So each periodical may have a unique GREP style associated with the Paragraph Style but I don't need to care. Once set right it just works.

Yes

I think the same as you...

Who never used Grep Styles, don't understand How magical it is... (and how different as a F/R it is..., including, how different as plain Grep F/R it is too.).

I suppose it's difficult to understand that 'magic', probably for someone who never used Grep Styles.
When you use linked text styles and include grep styles... wow!! the workflow is incredible. 

Definitively: +1 for GREP styles please 😀

I hope it would be take in consideration by the dev team.

My best wishes for all of you

Best Regards!

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  • 1 month later...

I also agree that GREP in styles needs to be an essential development. For me that will be the jumping off point of abandoning Adobe altogether and going completely with Affinity.

I use GREP in styles extensively, and nearly daily — especially in big publications like a magazine or book, where there are hundreds of pages to keep track of, and you don't want to have to run the same F/R every time text has been changed or added to.

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  • 2 months later...

Bonjour à tous,

le Grep est à la fois utile pour formater/modifier les documents et indispensable pour formater/modifier les documents longs.

Il est évident que les fonctionnalités proposées dans Publisher sont insuffisantes. La plupart des caractères (retour, espaces, retraits, sauts...) ne sont pas commentés et mettre en place, sans pour autant copier sticto sensu InDesign, un menu déroulant insérant le métacaractère équivalent au caractère sélectionné est un minimum.

InDesign souffre lui même d'un défaut d’ergonomie ne serait-ce qu'en mettant à la disposition de l'utilisateur des zones de saisies trops petites pour assurer une bonne lisibilité et afficher la totalité de l'expression.

De plus, lorsqu’on commence à utiliser le grep dans le rechercher/remplacer (F/R) de façon répétitive, on attend également de pourvoir scripter les actions pour être plus dynamique.

Étant un nouvel utilisateur de Publisher et un (très) ancien utilisateur de InDesign et des produits Aldus, Adobe ou Quark, ce qui m'a encore le plus surpris est la limitation de l'outil de rechercher/remplacer qui mérite une grosse amélioration, ne serait-ce que pour définir les localisations, le mode du rechercher/remplacer, et mémoriser ses recherches et expressions.
De ce point de vue, InDesign ou Xpress sont des exemples.
Améliorer le F/R serait déjà une bonne base pour accueillir de nouvelles fonctionnalités pour le grep.

Je rejoins tout ce qui a été dit avant, du grep dans les feuilles de styles, comme des feuilles de styles imbriquées est également indispensable.

Bonne continuation à tous avec Publisher, les styles imbriqués, le F/R, les scripts d'actions et le grep :). Surement, les équipes d'Affinity vont le faire.

Edited by uneMule
Mettre une phrase de fin !

Toujours pas !
Windows 10 Pro 21H2 - Intel Core i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz - 16 Gb Ram - GeForce GT 650M - Intel HD 4000
Affinity Photo | Affinity Designer | Affinity Publisher | 2

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14 minutes ago, uneMule said:

La plupart des caractères (retour, espaces, retraits, sauts...) ne sont pas commentés et mettre en place, sans pour autant copier sticto sensu InDesign, un menu déroulant insérant le métacaractère équivalent au caractère sélectionné est un minimum.

Many characters are available using the pulldown for the Find field. Is that what you were looking for?

image.png.8fcc0a8ba31ce4fe773ec30526cc7073.png

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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Bonjour Walt,

effectivement je suis d'accord avec ce commentaire.

Mais une expression écrite avec les métacaractères correspondant aux caractères permet une meilleure lecture de l'expression, de la copier et de l'éditer dans un éditeur de texte et peut-êtres dans un avenir proche de les mémoriser dans le rechercher/remplacer.

Pour le moment, cela me parait compliqué... mais il faut y croire :)

Bien à vous.

Toujours pas !
Windows 10 Pro 21H2 - Intel Core i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz - 16 Gb Ram - GeForce GT 650M - Intel HD 4000
Affinity Photo | Affinity Designer | Affinity Publisher | 2

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Re,

voici un exemple simple où l'utilisation de métaractères simplifie les choses et évite d'avoir recours à la table Unicode :

Rechercher une ponctuation précédée d’un ou plusieurs espaces quelconques : \s+([;:!?])
Remplacer par : \x{2009}$1

Espace U+0020
Espace cadratin    U+2003
Espace demi-cadratin    U+2002
Espace insécable    U+00A0
Espace insécable court    U+202F
Espace sans chasse    U+200b
Espace ultra-fin    U+200a
Espace fin     U+2009
Espace de ponctuation    U+2008
Espace tabulaire    U+2006
Antiliant sans chasse    U+200c
Tabulation    U+0009

Cordialement

Toujours pas !
Windows 10 Pro 21H2 - Intel Core i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz - 16 Gb Ram - GeForce GT 650M - Intel HD 4000
Affinity Photo | Affinity Designer | Affinity Publisher | 2

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On 10/8/2019 at 7:53 PM, big smile said:

+1 for GREP styles and Nested Styles

 

The Find and Replace is a powerful workaround, but being able to use GREP and Nested Styles would make things less error-prone (especially as Find and Replace doesn't allow you to save searches and it can be fiddly to enter in all the details on a repeated basis). 

Bonjour,

je suis tout à fait d'accord avec ce qui est dit.
Et effectivement le style grep est plus qu'une automatisation d'un rechercher/remplacer.
Dans un seul style on peut parfaitement mettre une valeur soit en vert, soit en orange, soit en rouge en fonction de sa valeur.
Ce qui nécessite de faire 3 rechercher/remplacer... et plus on multiplie les actions plus il y a risque d'erreur !

D'où également la nécessité de pouvoir scripter le rechercher/remplacer.

Cordialement.

Toujours pas !
Windows 10 Pro 21H2 - Intel Core i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz - 16 Gb Ram - GeForce GT 650M - Intel HD 4000
Affinity Photo | Affinity Designer | Affinity Publisher | 2

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  • 2 weeks later...

+1 for GREP styles!

I totally agree with everyone here. Starting with setting a different font for a certain character that’s not included in your font, to adjusting character spacing for particular combinations, to doing the whole styling just when inserting text, to all those other scenarios, people here described. Configure once and forget about everything, the flaws in your font, all the styling …

I might throw a party when Serif implement this. This is my number one feature request for the Affinity apps!

AND: By no means least, just a big applause to Serif for what the Affinity apps are right now! I get more and more excited about them, the more I use them!

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While I second the request for adding GREP styles, some of the requests in this thread (more related to Nested than GREP styles) seems to me to already be satisfied by the Initial Words part of the paragraph style design. You can't search for text strings, but you can tell AP that you must apply a particular character style to all text at the beginning of a paragraph, up to a punctuation sign (or any other symbol). So, you easily do the very common "Caution!" or "Note:" emphasis.

Paolo

 

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  • 3 months later...

GREP is very important to me, but I use a script that scans an entire book and applies custom kerning pairs in one pass. This honors the EULA that says no alteration of fonts, but it also allows me to make adjustments consistently and completely throughout large documents. 

I have so many custom data sets for faces, and this is largely what distinguishes my work, so there's really no point in using an application if I can't use it to distinguish my work. 

Here's a link to the script (and others). Maybe someone can comment on IF this type of scripting is accommodated, and if not, would this be something that would be included in future versions.

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/kern.html

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  • 1 month later...
On 6/22/2020 at 5:17 AM, PaoloT said:

While I second the request for adding GREP styles, some of the requests in this thread (more related to Nested than GREP styles) seems to me to already be satisfied by the Initial Words part of the paragraph style design. You can't search for text strings, but you can tell AP that you must apply a particular character style to all text at the beginning of a paragraph, up to a punctuation sign (or any other symbol). So, you easily do the very common "Caution!" or "Note:" emphasis.

This would certainly answer some of the things that I use GREP for,  but there is still a vast sea of application out there which it doesn't cover. One small example from a book that we printed from InDesign, which I then pulled into AP for testing.

Example: I have a "In Memorium" list from a club, and under each person's name, where applicable, it gives their official title in the club, if they held an office, along with the year served.

John Q. Public
Director — 2012

The paragraph style has after space to separate between the names, and the leading keeps the title/year up close to the person's name, via leading and a soft return.

I used GREP embedded in the Paragraph Style to look for every place where there is a soft return, followed by any text that ends with a 4-digit date, and then a paragraph return. To this found text, it applies a character style making it smaller and italic (similar to the John Q. Public example above). 

The beauty of this is that the entire list can be kept in one paragraph style, and the titles of each person, if applicable, get automatically formatted. Each quarter when we update this club directory, we can just drop in the new names, if any, and they automatically adapt to the same formatting rules. Kind of "set it, and forget it."

This is just one small example. I do massive documents where GREP is invaluable for looking for patterns in the text and auto formatting things that would take a lot of extra time/effort, and allowing me to focus more on all the other things.

——

Update: this particular example I gave here, I did just now figure a way to accomplish the same thing, by setting the title/date styling as the styling for the paragraph, and then applying an initial word character styling to everything before the name title/date. A different way of thinking of it, but it did work.

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  • 3 months later...

+1 for GREP styles!

This was something I asked for in the forum as soon as aPub was launched, but from what I see so far we still don't have the functionality, it's the main reason I haven't used it until now. 

I tried again to use it and again I stop because of an obstacle with grep styles, this time that cannot be solved with find replace.

Various paragraph styles that I use in some books, need the first letter of each word to be of a larger size. Including texts defined as a field on the master page, which we cannot change individually.  The only solution i see for this, is instead of using the automatic fields, having to manually type in each page and change the text style with a find / replace. Something totally unviable for books of 100 to 300 pages.

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1 hour ago, 3darkman said:

cannot be solved with find replace.

Various paragraph styles that I use in some books, need the first letter of each word to be of a larger size.

Though you could search for "blank space followed by any character" combined with the related paragraph style the still missing limiters of Find & Replace (selection, frame, story, page, …) could give you a hard time. So, just in case, you might want to  sign here, too:

 

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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42 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Though you could search for "blank space followed by any character" combined with the related paragraph style the still missing limiters of Find & Replace (selection, frame, story, page, …) could give you a hard time. So, just in case, you might want to  sign here, too:

 

I was talking about an automatic field on the master page, in my case, the Section Name, it doesn’t let me select just one character from the automatically generated text.

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On 1/19/2020 at 2:18 PM, Zbigg said:

Guys-any news reg GREP?

If you do DTP professionally, on regular basis - any discussion about GREP's superiority/inferiority is pointless.

Its a must. Also GREP capability in Text Styles got to be in 'basic package'. Iam serious.

+1 Would be very helpful for dynamic styling.

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