StylePainter (deprecated)

Intro – GREP Styles

This product is not supported any more, and won’t be updated or bug-fixed. It is still available for download on an ‘as-is’ basis.

This tool allows you to search throughout a document for one or more GREP expressions, and ‘paint’ various style attributes onto matching areas of text. GREP is a standardized, powerful way to search and match text patterns. It also works with InDesign CS and InDesign CS2 – bringing some GREP power to these older versions of InDesign.

Most of what this tool offers can also be achieved with GREP styles in CS4 and above, but there are a few differences which mean that even in newer versions of InDesign, this tool has some uses.

1. The GREP definitions are all listed in a text frame (called the stylepainterframe) which resides on the pasteboard – this makes it easy to re-use and share the same GREP-based style list between multiple documents – simply copy the stylepainterframe between documents.

2. You can have a whole list of GREP patterns, without needing to create a named style for each individual pattern.

Installation

Before you start installing, exit out of InDesign.

Please make sure you have a copy of the APID ToolAssistant plug-in installed. Make sure you install the proper plug-in for your version of InDesign since the plug-ins are mutually incompatible.

If you already have an APID ToolAssistant plug-in installed (e.g. because you use one of our other plug-ins), make sure it is up-to-date.

You will be installing two separate, but related software products: StylePainter and APID ToolAssistant. StylePainter will continue to work when the APID ToolAssistant demo expires.

i.e You do NOT need to purchase a license for APID ToolAssistant.

Copy the StylePainter.spln into the same folder as the APID ToolAssistant plug-in (typically that will be the InDesign Plug-Ins folder). Don’t worry about the icon of the .spln file: it might not be a ‘regular’ icon, and that’s OK.

Usage

You can list as many GREP expressions as you want in the style painter frame on the pasteboard, one GREP expression per paragraph, and you can apply different attributes to each and every one of these GREP expressions.

StylePainter will work its way through your list of GREP expressions from top to bottom, and apply each GREP expression to the whole document in turn.

It is possible that the pasteboard already contains some other text frames that might be confusing for the StylePainter. In that case you can ‘mark’ the stylepainterframe by giving it the script label: stylepainterframe.

Click here for more information on setting a script label

It is also possible to keep more than one stylepainterframe on the pasteboard all of which would need to have the proper script label.

If this happens, the StylePainter will pick the leftmost, uppermost stylepainterframe – so you can decide which of the stylepainterframe-s is ‘active’ simply by moving it leftmost, and highest on the pasteboard.

Click here for an example of how to use StylePainter

More Info

Check the sample grepstyles.indd document for a few slightly crazy examples.

Remark: InDesign CS4 and higher actually have more than one GREP engine inside the application. The GREP engine used by StylePainter is the GREP engine provided within the ExtendScript environment – which has some marked differences to the second GREP engine which is used with InDesign CS4’s named styles.