Advanced Tips: FrameMaker 12 and Regular Expressions

Recently, one of our most valued Adobe FrameMaker partners, Rick Quatro of Carmen Publishing, was a guest presenter on a lively session on how to use Regular Expressions (“RegEx”) in Find/Change within FrameMaker. This potent feature was added with the release of FrameMaker 12. You may view a recording of this session by clicking on the hyperlinked title below:

Register here to get access to the “Advanced Tips: FrameMaker 12 and Regular Expressions” webinar recording:

Advanced Tips: FrameMaker 12 and Regular Expressions

Note: When you follow this link, you will come to our event page. There you will need to click on [REGISTER] to obtain access to the recording. You will receive a confirmation webpage that has a link with the webinar name. Click on this link and you will see title and description, and the [REGISTER] button will have changed to [VIEW NOW].

The tool for using Regular Expressions in FrameMaker is very accessible. The challenge is understanding Regular Expressions. Rick Quatro revealed simple, progressive examples of this feature.

Note: at 54 minutes into the recording, you will see a pod appear that has an actual sample FrameMaker document with all of Rick’s samples, which you can use for your own hands on.

Recording Minute Markers

The following list is comprised of minute markers that will help you “fast forward” to points of particular interest.

03:30
About REGULAR EXPRESSIONS; exploring typical patterns with dates, phone numbers, etc, where numeric order can change significantly
04:30
how to FIND regular expressions in the FIND menu
08:20
what is a character class
12:40
Meta characters and their usage
12:30
use of backslash to delineate certain literal code characters
16:30
QUANTIFIERS
19:00
Example: finding sequences of numbers
20:00
Numeric qualifiers
27:00
Alteration using the “|” [pipe] character
31:30
Syntax for GROUPING
35:00
Dealing with WHOLE WORDS
37:20
shorthand for meta characters
38:30
“captured” text and back references
44:00
using “captured groups” for transposition
47:45
skipping denominators in fractions
54:00
POD appears for downloading Rick’s sample FM file
55:00
list of useful resources