Underlining just the word(s) in selected text string

Question

How do I get InDesign 2 or 3 to underline just the individual words selected and NOT the spaces?
We work with legal documents and we have to style them exactly the way the judge has indicated (some underline everything, some just the words). This can become a time consuming endeavor when there are multi-worded court cases cited and sometimes over one hundred cites within one document.
This was quick and easy under Quark, either from the control palette (click of a button) or the keyboard shortcut (Apple + shift + W). This shortcut closes the document in InDesign (even though the keyboard shortcut for that is supposed to be just Apple + W, both do the same thing). I could reassign the shortcut if I could find the action to link it too (but can't find the action even mentioned in the Help or the forums).
Have checked under the Underline Options dialog, but there isn't anything there that would solve this problem.
If there isn't a direct way to do it in InDesign, is there some sort of plug-in available that anyone knows about?
Thanks in advance.
LRP2

Answer 1

I don't believe there's a direct way to do it in Indesign. There are some shortcuts that help.
In CS4 you can set up a GREP search to find Words, set Change Format to change "basic character format" to include underline, then do a replace all in selection. You can set up keyboard shortcuts for some of this, but a script would be even more convenient.
Unfortunately, with the normal "Find" function, the "character" wildcard also seems to find spaces, and there isn't a "whole word" wildcard, so this won't work in CS2 or CS3.
The best I can think of at the moment is: Underline the whole text. Set Find What to find spaces (^w), leave Change To blank but in the Change Format box, turn off underline on Basic Character Formatting. Close the dialog box. Then, placing the cursor at the beginning, press shift-F3 (the standard shortcut for "Replace with Change To text and find next") for each space in the sentence. You can zip through the section fairly quickly.
This is really a job for scripting -- the script should change all characters in the selection to underline, then change all white space characters in the selection back to non-underline. Scripts can be assigned a keyboard shortcut for ultimate convenience.
Rodney