But there is such a website! One page, for example, is this: FindBetween: A Useful GREP String

For your purposes, you need to adjust the example to the following:

(?<=[).*?(?=])

and leave the Change To field blank, applying Italics in the Change To format box. This does not address your specification

The text is within a paragraph and never a standalone paragraph. The text can be from 3 words on up in length.

— but is that really important? Because that's still possible using GREP, but the expression will go from “Anne-Marie can explain it” to “Jongware'll need to scratch his noodle to make it do exactly that, no more and no less”.

(Even better: do not apply 'italic' as a font override, as it will give the paragraph the nasty '+' “there is something going on here” mark, but create a Character Style for your italics and apply that instead.)

Markny8,

I see an option to import, but how do you export them?

That's the same for a number of formatting objects — paragraph and character styles, variables, master pages, perhaps some more. The intent was not to be able to export them, but rather the reverse: import them from an existing document. If you select any of the “Load xxx” menu items, the file list will default to “Readable documents” which only will contain actual InDesign documents.

So if you want some sort of repository, you could indeed follow Furry's advice and store all of them in a single document.

Dona, you have to double-click the script in the Script panel to run it.

You say you are using CS5.5 — I wrote it for an older version of InDesign and didn't test it on any newer versions, so unfortunately it might just not work.

Can't be done.

(Said under the 'fluence so othes opinions may differ.)

oh okay, that's really funny. I copied the wrong part.

Edit -> Keybord shortcuts -> Show set button. Then look for

Product area : Object Editing

and yer kb shortcuts wil be below that.

Gosh I'm really ashamed to habve to tell you this (w.o. lots o' typos) 'cause I'm really wasted at the mo' in remembrance of a good friend's birthday (hi René'). Did you check out “Show set” in the shortcut editor? If you do, you'd find this

Horizontal Align Center — [none defined] Delete all Guides — [none defined] Decrease size by 5% — [none defined] Decrease size by 1% — [none defined] Decrease scale by 5% — Default: Opt+Cmd+, Decrease scale by 1% — Default: Cmd+,Product area : Object Editing

That's what Numbered Groups are for. Search for this:

(l)-(l)

and replace with

$1$2

But it can be done with a bit more flair — by not 'finding' the lowercase characters at all! (Don't worry, I'll walk you thru it.)

For that, you have to visualize how a regular Find works: you type in what needs to be found, press the Find button once, and InDesign selects the 'found text'. What if you coud find only the hyphens which have a lowercase character before and after it? — Notice how this is distinctly different from what you do right now, that is, looking for the exact sequence “lowercase – hyphen – lowercase”!

This lil' bit of magic can be done using “lookbehind” and “lookforward” sequence. Inside the “lookbehind” sequence you can specify what needs to be to the left of 'the text you actually found'. This fragmentatte:

(?<=l)-

will only find-and-select individual hyphens that are preceeded by a lowercase character. A phrase worthy of emphasizing.

Simlarly, this one:

-(?=l)

will only find-and-select hyphens that are followed by a lowercase character. And yes! you can combine these two:

(?<=l)-(?=l)

will only select hyphens that … well, see the above :) Replace with Nothing-At-All, and thus you'll be effectively removing the hyphens without touching anything else.

So what is the advantage of this method? In this case, it's rather miniscule. InDesign will not 'touch' the characters left and right of the hyphen; in particular, it will not “remove” them and then “re-insert” them again for the Replace operation. (I think this is rather how Search-and-Replace works, internally.) So it'll run fractionally faster. But consider a situation where you want to apply formatting to these occurrences of hyphens only when preceeded and succeeded by lowercase. You cannot do this with regular Search/Replace, and nor with the Numbered Grouping method. But with the lookbehind and lookahead function means you can!

It's this entirely new learning paradigm: “don't you go and tell me where to find the solution, just tell me what it is!” I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned.

This is the discussion I remembered it from: https://www.pigsgourdsandwikis……-bugs.html – but you'll still have to read it top to bottom by yourself, I'm not going to summarize it.