GREP Styles impact on Processing

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ppietras

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Jun 10, 2026, 1:02:23 PMJun 10
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We run a couple of milllion personalized postcards though uProduce every month.

Can anyone tell me if GREP Styles significantly impact the speed of uProduce when running a process job?

I have a design instance where a GREP style would be ideal to fix a formatting issue. However, I don't want to use it if it's going to create signicant overhead in processing time.

Of course, I will test, but I'm hoping someone has some advice they can provide.

Thanks in Advance.

west-digital.fr

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Jun 11, 2026, 4:04:03 AMJun 11
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I am afraid that any universal / too theoretical answer to your question could not be applied to your specific context (that I do not know).
As it all depends on the complexity (or excess of non-complexity) of the regular expressions that your GREP styles use, and the specific documents that you will process.

Say that I stupidely define "." as my GREP style regular expression. So simple to read ( = a dot), but its effect is that the related Character style will be applied to each and every character in my document, that uses the related Paragraph style (except line terminators). So maybe a large amount of them.

Or, say that I define "(text1|text2|text3|[...]|text100)" as a regular expression: easy to read ("do it, if this or if that or..."), but this will force InDesign to loop each and every alternative, and check if it can be found in your document, then apply the Character style.

Or another regular expression that looks simple to read, such as  "(a+)+b", which I think means: "please search for any number of the "a" letter, followed by a "b" letter". This could take a large amount of processing time, particularly if this series of "a" letters does exist, but unfortunately never ends up with the expected "b" letter: InDesign will try and try and try - like the Rolling Stones - but with no final satisfaction either. Time lost for nothing.

My idea is that, an A/B test (no GREP/GREP) is the only way to demonstrate the real impact of your GREPs on your documents. Maybe nothing - or so little - or huge.

Tyrone O’Brien

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Jun 11, 2026, 6:49:52 AMJun 11
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I believe no as I used grep to control $ and .00c in a 32-36 page variable data catalogue of over 15k and there was no issue with the processing speed.

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rhopfner

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Jun 11, 2026, 11:58:02 AMJun 11
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I used to use GREP with XMpie of various complexities and there was never a noticeable performance issue. We had a 24 core server to push millions of records so it was never a problem. 



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