greps

Regular Expressions for Scribus

A full-featured Find/Change engine inspired by Adobe InDesign GREP

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Author: Richard Sitányi (richard@cdbox.sk)

File: greps.py

Version: 1.0

Date: 12/02/2025

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Overview

GREPS is an advanced Find/Change dialog for Scribus, bringing a powerful regular expression engine, Unicode support, reusable queries, and an intuitive UI modeled after Adobe InDesign GREP search.

It is designed to overcome the limitations of Scribus’ built-in Search/Replace and provide professional-grade text processing directly inside Scribus documents.

Key Features

Full Regular Expression Support

Powered by Python’s re engine:

• searching in current Story or entire Document
• supports lookahead / lookbehind
• supports capturing groups and replacements
• supports unicode-aware character classes

4 Types of Unicode Input Supported

You can mix them freely:

Syntax	Example	Meaning
\xXX	\x20	2-digit hex
\uXXXX	\u0020	4-digit Unicode
\UXXXXXXXX	\U0001F600	8-digit Unicode
\N{NAME}	\N{EN SPACE}	Unicode by name
TAGS	<NBSP>, <EMSPACE>, <ENDPARA>	Custom shortcuts

All are normalized automatically by normalize_input().

Custom TAGS greatly simplify writing patterns and are especially useful for whitespace, breaks, and special characters.

Powerful Custom Search/Replace UI

Special Character Menus

Extensive style menu for both search field and replace field:

• White spaces (normal, thin, hair, em/en, NBSP, etc.)
• Hyphens and dashes
• Quotation marks (straight, smart, angle quotes…)
• Symbols (bullet, copyright, trademark…)
• Parentheses & brackets
• Break characters (line/column/frame break, end of paragraph)
• Unicode insertion helpers
• Wildcards
• Locations (word boundaries, beginning/end of paragraph…)
• Repetitions (*, +, ?, lazy quantifiers)
• Matches (groups, non-capturing, lookaheads/lookbehinds)
• Modifiers ((?i), (?a))
• Found groups (<FOUND1> … <FOUND9>) for replacement

Query System

• Save and load your own GREP queries
• Query history for both search and replace fields
• A special [Custom] entry is used when modifying an existing or creating own query

Fully Scripted GREP Workflow

Buttons:

• Find next
• Change
• Change all
• Change/Find

Scribus-Specific Notes

Line Break and End of Paragraph ARE NOT \n

Scribus internally uses special characters:

Meaning	TAG	Unicode
End of paragraph	<ENDPARA>	\u000D (CR)
Line break	<LINEBREAK>	\u2028
Column break	<COLUMNBREAK>	\u001A
Frame break	<FRAMEBREAK>	\u001B

Because of this:

• ^ and $ match start/end of entire text, not each paragraph
• (?m) multiline flag does NOT behave like should be
• . does NOT match across paragraphs
• Patterns expecting \n for paragraph breaks will fail

This is not a bug:
Scribus does not use LF (\n) to represent paragraphs.

Use TAGS instead:

• <ENDPARA>
• <LINEBREAK>
• etc.

Behavior Notes

Fully Unicode-Aware Regular Expressions

Python’s regex engine treats \w, \b, etc. as Unicode-aware, so:

• \bže\b works correctly
• diacritic letters behave as expected
• NBSP and exotic spaces are non-word characters

Accurate Story / Document Processing

• Find/Change correctly handles linked frames
• No text loss or corruption
• Story-specific searches never overwrite the wrong story

Replace supports capture groups

Use <FOUND1> … <FOUND9> in replacement field.

Tested Scribus Versions

GREPS has been tested extensively on:

• Scribus 1.6.4 (stable)
• Scribus 1.7.0 (development)

All features work identically across both versions.

Limitations

• ^ and $ match start/end of entire text, not each paragraph
• Multiline regex ((?m)) does not behave like should be due to Scribus '\r' paragraphs
• DOTALL ((?s)) does not cross <ENDPARA> boundaries

Saved Queries

Examples are provided in queries.json

Installation

1. Place greps folder containing greps.py file and queries folder where you store your scripts.
2. Run script via Script → Execute Script…