Making ogoneks with GREP style

Question

I followed this solution to make Polish ogoneks in InDesign through GREP style BUT every time I use it, the negative tracking is also be applied to the space or next character which immediately follows it. Is there any way to prevent this from happening?

Answer 1

Ideally there would be a regular expression that would say something like "if e is followed by ogonek, then style e", because that would only apply the negative tracking to the initial letter. I wasn't able to figure that out, though, so here's a workaround:

Create another character style. You already have one that has your negative tracking; create another one that has a tracking of 0. Apply the negative tracking style to "e˛" or whatever your range of characters is, and then apply the tracking style of 0 to just the ogonek.

Answer 2

I should have been more explicit in my original answer on this topic. The way you make this work is by using GREP's "Positive Lookahead". Here's an expression that applies a character style to a letter that is followed by an ogonek: [\l\u](?=˛) In English that means "apply the style to any single upper or lowercase letter that comes immediately before an ogonek, but not to the ogonek itself.

You would have to experiment with the exact negative tracking value for the particular typeface you were using. In my case it was -400 using Myriad Pro at 12 pt.