Quick GREP To Superscript Ordinals

Peter Hertzmann says:

This brings up an off-topic pet peeve of mine. I don’t know when ordinals set in superscript were introduced to the computer world. The first time I ran into it was when Word introduced their auto-correct feature and all of a sudden, every document I got from somebody using the program as a plain typewriter seemed to be covered in the ordinals set in superscript.

As a sometimes historian used to spending hours in old French books, seeing ordinals set in superscript are a commonplace occurrence, but it’s not something I use in modern writing. It is an archaic form of typesetting. In their discussion of ordinals, The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) always sets them as normal type. It is only in it’s discussion of documenting titles (see §17.52) where superscript ordinals are addressed there it states that superscript ordinals ?may? be changed to normal type.

Scott says:

I have to agree with Old Jeremy.

The old guys got it right. Superscripting the letter pair puts the emphasis on the important part, the number, which makes for easier reading without errors. Same goes for the registered and trademark symbols. They can get in the way otherwise.

I would also say the same for “old style figures.” I’ve recently been reading through a lot of 100 year old engineering books and have found that old style figures are far easier to read (with their baseline shifts up and down) than “modern” style figures in large tables (which are now as difficult to read quickly as all caps, for me).

Scott

P.S. I just notices the comment text uses old style figures (at least on my Mac running Safari v4 beta). Nice touch!

Old Jeremy says:

If you’re looking for any digit coming immediately after any capital letter, you might try this:

(?<=\u)\d

MarcusStringer says:

Almost every title we produce has these characters as normal instead of superscript. This is the first thing we change, (superscript to normal)

Klaus Nordby says:

David, you’re rocking with good GREP stuff these days, thanks!

I’m with Old Jeremy here: ordinals are rather special stuff, conceptually-pronounciationally (pardon!), and the old-style way of superscripting them is The One True Way.

Modern-day style manuals are of . . . highly uneven quality, as they often are polluted by many bad, modern practices, and therefore shouldn’t be taken as biblical commandments whereas *proper* typography is concerned.

Nadya Miloserdova says:

This technique may be possibly useful when you need to write about square millimeters, etc.
Find the string mm2 (or mm3) and lift the digit into superscript with the following Find/Change Query (either store it for future, or use it as a GREP style):
Find What: ([question mark]
Change to: +supercript (leave this field empty, change the formatting only)
The same is applicable to sq.cm, sq.m, etc.

ep says:

Great tips, thanks.
I would add that you can search for accented characters like in french ordinals: 1ère or 2ème by adding these searches to your ‘or’ expression:
[[=e=]]me|[[=e=]]re

Troy Cole says:

Thank you everyone. This is very helpful and exactly what I was looking for. I’m currently laying out a French document which has a lot of instances of numbers such as, 1er, 2e 3ième, etc.

Using the comments above I’ve modified the search string to

(?<=d|_)(e|er|ième|er/ème)>

This pretty much does what I need it to but one thing that I have not been able to figure out, is how do you search for a string that includes a forward slash. One of the items I need to search for is “_____er/ème” (the document is an agreement and the underscores represent a field to be filled in with a numberal).

Is there an easy solution to including a forward slash in the search?

Thanks,
Troy

Troy Cole says:

Hi ep,

Thanks for your reply. I figured that there must be something like this to work around the foreward slash. However, I still can’t quite get this to work. I’ve modified my search to the following

(?<=d|_)(e|er|ième|er\/ème)>

And I’ve tried a number of variations, all with the same results. It will find and replace up to the second “er” but that’s where it stops. If anyone has any thoughts on the detail I’m missing here, I would love to hear it.

For the record, the accented characters seemed to work just fine, without any modification.

Troy

Troy Cole says:

Interesting! Changing the order worked like a charm!

This is my first venture into the world of GREP. From what I’ve seen it looks like it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks a bunch for your help with this.
Much appreciated!

Troy

Amy says:

This is awesome! Exactly what I was looking for.

Cheryl says:

Thank you so much just what I am looking for.

Lucas says:

@ Elizabeth O:
Try: (?<=H)12(?=O)|(?<=C|O)6
but you have to do a glyphformat using superscript first.

Hello David,
i'm struggling with a javascript, which should put either the otSubscript or the subscript value to the app.changeGrepPreferences.position

unfortunately it does either do it otSuperscript (and leaves the inexistent OpenType-Characters untouched) or superscript. Can you give me a hand with this? My Code looks like this:

var myDocument = app.documents.item(0);
app.findGrepPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.changeGrepPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.findChangeGrepOptions.includeFootnotes = false;
app.findChangeGrepOptions.includeHiddenLayers = false;
app.findChangeGrepOptions.includeLockedLayersForFind = false;
app.findChangeGrepOptions.includeLockedStoriesForFind = false;
app.findChangeGrepOptions.includeMasterPages = false;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "(?<=m)2";
app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = "2";
app.changeGrepPreferences.underline = false;
app.changeGrepPreferences.position = Position.otSubscript;
myDocument.changeGrep();
app.findGrepPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.changeGrepPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "(?<=m)2";
app.changeGrepPreferences.changeTo = "2";
app.findGrepPreferences.position = Position.normal;
app.changeGrepPreferences.underline = false;
app.changeGrepPreferences.position = Position.subscript;
myDocument.changeGrep();
app.findGrepPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;
app.changeGrepPreferences = NothingEnum.nothing;

Cheers Lucas

harimangalassery says:

Thank u very well options

Wink says:

Chiming in—10 years later—to say that this hint and the associated comments were incredibly helpful to me as I set up yet another batch of paragraph styles for yet another report in my science/engineering/you-don’t-have-cholera-and-you’re-welcome publishing field, where the “dated, ineffectual, ugly” superscripts are of huge importance for clarification when the reading audience is responsible for building your public infrastructure. I might not use them in an ad campaign, but I’ll do everything within my power to make sure this *particular* audience has no trouble understanding at a glance what’s being communicated.