You'll find dozens of uses for InDesign's Find/Change command (found in the Edit menu). By way of illustration, suppose you type (or Place) an article about dogs. Each occurrence of the word "dog"-and there could be thousands of occurrences-is bold. You decide to change the focus of the article to cats. You can use Find/Change to locate all occurrences of the word "dog" that are bold and replace them with the word "cat" set in italics.
You can also use Find/Change to search for nonprinting symbols (Hidden Characters) such as hard returns, tabs and multiple spacebar spaces. In your placed text file, the text was typed with two hard returns after every paragraph and two spaces at the end of each sentence. Typing two hard returns after every paragraph is not the correct way to control the amount of white space between block-style paragraphs. You control spacing by specifying a Space After amount in the Paragraph panel. Typing two spaces at the end of a sentence is correct on a typewriter, but incorrect for typesetting on a computer. On a computer, there should be only one space after a sentence.
Because you'll find yourself finding and changing the same problems over and over, you will appreciate the fact that you can now save your Find/Change searches for future use in any InDesign document.
Use the Find/Change to Remove Extra Paragraph Breaks
Here's how I used InDesign's Find/Change command to remove several extra end of paragraph marks in a document.
- First I selected Edit > Find/Change to display the Find/Change dialog box
- On the Text tab, I clicked the Special characters for search button (the arrow to the right of the Find What area)
- I selected End of Paragraph
The special character ^p appeared in the field. - I typed another ^p into the Find what area
- Then I typed ^p into the Change to area
My Find what and Change to areas looked like the picture below. - I clicked Change All
- I was alerted that 14 replacements had been made
After fixing the problem in the document, it occurred to me that I'd run into this same problem the next time I imported text from the same author. I decided to save the Query I'd just run so that I could use it again down the road.
Save a Query
- I displayed the Find/Change dialog box again and made sure the last find/change I'd run was still in the dialog box
- I clicked the Save Query button
The Save Query dialog box appeared. - I typed Replace 2 End of Para with 1 into the Name field and clicked OK
Now that the Query has been saved, I can quickly run the Query in the future and take care of this problem in any other InDesign documents.
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Great article. I use these types of find/change queries all the time in CS2 and look forward to being able to save them in CS3. One problem, which I don't know if they've solved in CS3, is changing Paragraph Returns into Enters (moving text on to the next text box). Being able to do this would save me tens of hours on some of the projects I work on. There is a symbol for 'End of Paragraph' (^p) and 'Forced Line Break' (^n) but not for 'Enter'. Can you shed any light on this?
Posted by: Edward Pugh | August 03, 2007 at 07:18 AM
Edward, you're talking about the keyboard shortcut for column break I think (which is 'enter' on the number pad). The code reference for this is ^M. Or you could use frame break, which is ^R.
M
Posted by: Mhasteley | November 06, 2007 at 12:26 PM
Can you publish a list of all the code references? I need one for tabs, and I'm sure I'll think of more in the future.
Posted by: slittle | August 21, 2008 at 12:54 PM