Searching and Replacing
InDesign's Find/Change dialog (Edit ‚ Find/Change, or z +F or Ctrl+F) lets you do everything from, for example, finding the next instance of curry in an article so you can insert extra spicy in red, to finding all instances of a deposed chef's name in six different documents. If you know how to use the search-and-replace feature in any word processor or page-layout application, you'll be comfortable with InDesign's Find/Change in no time.
Searching and replacing text
The Find/Change dialog box comes in two forms: reduced for finding and changing just text, and expanded for including attributes in a search. The More Options button expands the dialog box to include formatting options for your search and replace, and the Fewer Options button reduces it.
Before starting a Find/Change operation, determine the scope of your search:
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To search within a text selection, highlight it.
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To search from a certain location in a story to the end of it, click the cursor at that location.
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To search an entire story, select any frame or click at any point in a frame containing the story.
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To search an entire document, simply have that document open .
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To search multiple documents, open all of them (and close any that you don't want to search).
To search for text:
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Determine the scope of your search, as just described, open the needed documents, and insert the text cursor at the appropriate location.
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Choose Edit ‚ Find/Change or press z +F or Ctrl+F.
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Use the Search pop-up menu, as shown in Figure 15-6, to specify the scope of your search: Document, All Documents, Story, To End of Story, or Selection.
Figure 15-6: Use the Search pop-up menu in the Find/Change dialog box to specify the scope of the text to search.Which options are available will be based on your current text selection in InDesign. Unavailable options are grayed out.
Tip ‚ As you're using the Find/Change dialog box to search and replace text, you can jump into a text frame (just click it with the Type pointer) and edit it as you please , then return to Find/Change by clicking the Find/Change dialog box.
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Type or paste the text you want to find in the Find What field.
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Type or paste the replacement text into the Change To field.
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Specify whether to find the word within other words (for example, cafe within cafeteria or just cafe ) by checking or unchecking Whole Word.
When checked, Find/Change will only locate standalone instances of the Find What text.
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Specify whether to consider capitalization patterns in the Find/Change operation by checking or unchecking Case Sensitive.
When checked, Find/Change follows the capitalization of the text in the Find What and Change To fields exactly.
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Click Find Next to start the search.
Thereafter, click Find Next to skip instances of the Find What text, and click Change, Change All, or Change/Find to replace the Find What text with the Change To text. (Change simply changes the found text, Change All changes every instance of that found text in your selection or story, and Change/Find changes the current found text and moves on to the next occurrence of it ‚ it basically does in one click the actions of clicking Change and then Find Next.)
Note ‚ If you use the Change All feature, InDesign reports how many changes were made. If the number looks extraordinarily high and you suspect the Find/Change operation wasn't quite what you wanted, remember you can use InDesign's undo function (Edit ‚ Undo, or z +Z or Ctrl+Z) to cancel the search and replace, and then try a different replace strategy.
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Click Done when you're all done.
Note that you can do several search-and-replace operations, which is why the dialog box stays open after completing a search ‚ and that's why there is a Done button for you to tell InDesign to close the dialog box.
Tip ‚ InDesign records your last 15 entries in the Find What and Change To fields, so you can repeat previous Find/Change operations. That's why each field is a pop-up menu. Click the menu to open it, and use the down-arrow key to scroll through those recorded operations.
Finding special characters
You're not limited to finding and changing words and phrases. You can search and replace spaces, tabs, paragraph returns, and other invisible characters along with special characters such as bullets, em dashes, and nonbreaking spaces. Searching and replacing these types of characters is often helpful for repair jobs: fixing imported text that contains double spaces after periods, extra returns between paragraphs, and hyphens instead of em dashes.
To enter invisible characters, special characters, or wild cards in the Find What or Change To fields, click the arrow buttons to the right of the fields. You'll get a menu that offers options such as Bullet Character, Hair Space, and Discretionary Hyphen, as shown in Figure 15-7. You can select any combination of these characters and combine them with other text and formatting attributes. Table 15-1 shows the text codes you can use in place of these menu items.
Figure 15-7: Click the right- facing arrow on the Find What and Change To fields to display a list of special characters.
| Character | Code |
|---|---|
| Markers and Tabs | |
| Auto page numbering | ^# |
| Section marker | ^x |
| End of paragraph | ^p |
| Forced line break | ^n |
| Inline graphic marker [*] | ^g |
| Tab | ^t |
| Right-indent tab | ^y |
| Indent to here | ^i |
| Symbols | |
| Bullet ( ‚ ) | ^8 |
| Caret (^) | ^^ |
| Copyright ( ‚ ) symbol | ^2 |
| Paragraph ( ‚ ) symbol | ^7 |
| Registered trademark ( ‚ ) symbol | ^r |
| Section ( ‚ §) symbol | ^6 |
| Punctuation | |
| Double left quotation mark (") | ^{ |
| Double right quotation mark (") | ^} |
| Single left quotation mark (') | ^[ |
| Single right quotation mark (') | ^] |
| Em dash ( ‚ ) | ^_ |
| En dash ( ‚ ) | ^= |
| Discretionary hyphen | ^- |
| Nonbreaking hyphen | ^~ |
| Spaces | |
| Em space | ^m |
| En space | ^> |
| Flush space | ^f |
| Hair space | ^ |
| Nonbreaking space | ^s |
| Thin space | ^< |
| White space (any space or tab) [*] | ^w |
| Wild Cards | |
| Any character [*] | ^? |
| Any digit [*] | ^9 |
| Any letter [*] | ^$ |
| [*] Can be entered in the Find What box only. | |
| Note ‚ | To search and replace regular spaces, type the number of spaces you want to find and change in the Find What and Change To fields ‚ as if they were any other regular character. |
If there are other characters not in InDesign's special-character menu that you want to search for or replace with, just enter their keyboard codes (see Chapter 41) or paste them into the field. (You can paste them by first copying them to the Clipboard from your document text, or from a utility like PopChar X or Key Caps on the Mac or Character Map in Windows, as Chapter 14 explains.)
InDesign also provides three wild cards, which let you search for unspecified characters, numbers , or letters in other text. For example, if you want to change all the numbered steps in a document to bulleted lists, you might search for Any Digit and replace it with a bullet. Or you can search for variations of a word to find, say, cafe and caf ƒ at the same time.
Searching and replacing formatting
To find and change formatting or text with specific formatting, you can use the expanded Find/Change dialog box. For example, you might find all the blue words in 14-point Futura Extra Bold and change them to 12-point Mrs Eaves Bold. Or you might find all instances of the words hot and spicy in 15-point body text, then resize the text to 12 point and apply Red Litterbox.
To replace text formatting, follow these steps:
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To add formats to a Find/Change operation for text, click the More Options button in the Find/Change dialog box (if it was not clicked earlier).
The dialog box expands to include the Find Format Settings and Change Format Settings areas, as shown in Figure 15-8.
Figure 15-8: Clicking More Options in the Find/Change dialog box displays the Find Format Settings and Change Format Settings areas. Clicking Format opens the Find Format Settings or Change Format Settings dialog box. -
Use the Format buttons to display the Find Format Settings and Change Format Settings dialog boxes, which let you specify the formats you want to find.
The two dialog boxes are identical, except for their names ; refer to Figure 15-8 for the Find Format Settings one.
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Use the menu at the top to specify the type of formatting: Style Options (style sheets), Basic Character Formats, Advanced Character Formats, Indents and Spacing, Keep Options, Character Color, OpenType Features, Underline Options, Strikethrough Options, and Drop Caps and Other.
You can change multiple attributes at once by making selections from as many panes as needed.
Tip ‚ To search and replace formatting only ‚ regardless of the text to which it is applied ‚ leave the Find What and Change To fields blank.
Locating and specifying all the formatting you want to find and change requires you to dig deeper and deeper into the Find Format Settings and Change Format Settings dialog boxes. Unfortunately, you can't really get a picture of all the formats you're selecting at once, and you have to keep jumping from one pane to the next. Fortunately, when you're finished selecting formats, the selected options are summarized in the Find Style Settings and Change Style Settings areas.
