Technical (Indesign) – Find/Change Feature

This post continues from my last one and I will show you how to simply find and replace hyphens (-) to en dashes (–) throughout the document.

Bet most of you are familiar with Find/Change feature in Indesign. For those who seldom use this feature, go to Edit in the menu bar and you will find Find/Change or the keyboard shortcut for this is Command+F.

There are two ways to perform the task:

Method One.
If you are using Indesign CS3 or higher version, you will find the Query menu at the top. Click on Dash to En-dash and this will bring you to the GREP option. (GREP stands for General Regular Expression Parser and was a power text search utility based on Unix.)

Then you will find the fields already filled with preset values. Simply click on Find button and you should be directed to the first hyphen found in your body copy, if it exists in an expression of space+hyphen+space. Click on Change/Find button and it will replace your first hyphen with en dash and move on to the next one.

Tips:
I usually hit the Change/Find button for a few times to ensure the feature replace the right instances before I finally hit the Change All button. If error occurs, you can always undo the change(s) by Command+Z.

See, Method One is so simple and easy. And I will explain Method Two in the next post.