Seen it once too often, and send that file (with the ID result) to Adobe tech support. I explained that text was cut off and appeared at the end of the document. Their reply (after a couple o'weeks): “Oh, that's because the margins in Word are different than those of your ID document. You can't expect every paragraph to be broken the same.”

That caused a loud “D'oh!” to reverb to the jongware office.

I re-submitted it, telling them to take a closer look, and haven't heard back since.

By the way, re-saving the file from Word, as regular DOC, as RTF, or as DOCX sometimes works. In case it doesn't, I still have a CS3 nearby, and in every case so far that imported a troublesome document flawless.

Erick, no harm done, except it might get hard to have four people (five now) speaking through eachother on not-too related topics …

Yikes, Eugene! That'll eat the middle digits right out of “12-34 mm”! Let's see. “24 – 105mm” or “70-200 mm” to “70-200mm”. Digits, some optional spaces, and a hyphen. Well, you were on the right track, but your previous efforts used the 'any' character, removing it as-you-went, no matter what it was. All it takes is a precise copy of the format, with question marks making the spaces optional:

(d) ?- ?(d+) ?mm

— replacing with

$1-$2mm

I prefer to use as much lookbehind and lookahead as possible, as (I think) it's faster to change as less as possible, but here I might get a bit less obvious:

(?<=d) ?- ?(d+) ?(?=mm)

— replacing with

-$1

A quick GREP primer: One-or-more is +. Any character is . so it's not a good idea to use this … Put a ackslash before it to make it literal: \. That makes the search expression

\.+

and you should replace it with a simple tab:

Now hold on before you run off: that one-or-more means that a single period will also be replaced by a tab. I bet that's not what you had in mind, so let's make sure it only works with, say, 3 or more. This, instead, would work

\.\.\.+

but you can go for a fancy notation as well:

\.{3,}

No need for a plus! The {3,} part means: at least three times and an unlimited max (as there is no number given). (Some useful variants could be {3} to only find sets of 3 periods, or {3,5} to only find sets of 3, 4, and 5 periods.)

(Erick, why not simply create a new thread?)

With lookbehind, search for:

(?<=\d)~}

replace with

~”

… whoa! I cannot copy and paste that expression to here! Something about InDesign or the Mac OS clipboard converts the grep expression to a bunch of white spaces!…

Surprise, surprise! It's an Adobe thingy — it works the same on Windows. I bet it was some smarty pants programmer's Finest Hour, since it means if you use copy-and-paste between an ID document and the regular Find box or the GREP Find box it automagically translates any special character into the correct shortcut representation. (Try it: copy some special characters from your text into the Find box — here they become the circumflex thingies — and then paste them into the GREP box — they'll translate to tilde-something something.) And yes, it is a bit annoying if you try to copy something out of InDesign …

JC, I'm having a hard time imagining s did not work at all in CS3. I'm pretty sure I've used it a few times. By the way, I recommend to not use it! I found its habit of also including the paragraph return totally unacceptable, so for just spaces, I use the slightly longer expression

[ ~s~S~<~>]

(and perhaps a couple more). The longer expression is not a problem because that's what “Save Search” is for :-D

… whoa! I cannot copy and paste that expression to here! Something about InDesign or the Mac OS clipboard converts the grep expression to a bunch of white spaces!…

Surprise, surprise! It's an Adobe thingy — it works the same on Windows. I bet it was some smarty pants programmer's Finest Hour, since it means if you use copy-and-paste between an ID document and the regular Find box or the GREP Find box it automagically translates any special character into the correct shortcut representation. (Try it: copy some special characters from your text into the Find box — here they become the circumflex thingies — and then paste them into the GREP box — they'll translate to tilde-something something.) And yes, it is a bit annoying if you try to copy something out of InDesign …

JC, I'm having a hard time imagining did not work at all in CS3. I'm pretty sure I've used it a few times. By the way, I recommend to not use it! I found its habit of also including the paragraph return totally unacceptable, so for just spaces, I use the slightly longer expression

[ ~s~S~<~>]

(and perhaps a couple more). The longer expression is not a problem because that's what “Save Search” is for :-D

I don't think this will totally suit your needs, as it has no problems automatically expanding vertically, but horizontally is a bit more complicated (you have to remember to drag the right guide):

Make it a table.

Create a table, 3 columns, 3 rows. Set the row height of the top and bottom row to exactly the inset value you want (you might have to set the cell insets to 0 all around before ID allows you to make it very small). Do same for the leftmost and rightmost columns. Then give the inner cell the dotted outline you want, and add some cell insets all around, so your text won't be flush against the dotted border.

Ah — my poor brain. You are correct, you did mention it's just a model name change. Yup — for that you might prefer Conditional Text.

It's as simple as it sounds: you create two conditions, you mark the text that ought to show and hide for each version, and then you can toggle one to On and the other Off.

Just like with layers, you wouldn't want both on or off. I imagine it would be useful to be able to define a set of mutually excluding conditions, so you can't ever have that happen. Perhaps this suggestion can still make it in time for CS5 :-D