Can Anchor marks be searched … any way?

Question

Hi guys,(using a new account, for the time being, until my "real" one is being fixed by Adobe) I'm into a new script to create/ manage Xrefs via tagged texts and I'm floored to see that F/C (grep tab obviously) seems not being able to find Anchors text (~I in grep)- A copy/ paste form a textframe into the F/C does show the correct character, nicely saying that it should be possible to find it.  I'm assuming I do something wrong. @Peter Kahrel did create a script to manage Text anchors (https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/text_anchors.html) so it's definitely possible to do something about them via script.But what about via F/C? Any experience on the matter guys?Thanks for your lights PS: Why I'm asking?Because I'd like to check/ remove conditionnal text that may be applied on them. It'll be simple enough via F/C window.

Peter Kahrel · Accepted Answer

Joel is spot-on. My script looks for all text anchors (hyperlinkTextDestinations for JavaScript) -- that's the easy part. But the anchors don't tell you what they're used for, so you have to bend over backwards to find whether they's used for cross-references, hyperlinks, bookmarks, or whatever.

Using the F/C window is useless: you can look for <FEFF> but you can't do anything with what you found. A script thinks that though what you find has length 1, it has no content.

I don't know in what way you want to manage ankers and cross-refs, but to find all text anchors that are part of cross-references, you should collect all hyperlinks, then get those whose destinations are a HyperlinkTextDestination and whose source is a CrossReferenceSources. Along these lines:

hlinks = app.activeDocument.hyperlinks.everyItem().getElements();
for (i = 0; i < hlinks.length; i++) {
  if (hlinks[i].destination instanceof HyperlinkTextDestination
       && hlinks[i].source instanceof CrossReferenceSource) {
    // Your custom function
    doSomethingWithTextAnchor (hlinks[i].destination);
  }
}

Joel Cherney · Answer

Depends on what kind of anchors you mean. I think you can search for anchors just fine with the Find/Change dialog, both in the regular Text tab as well as the GREP tab. Use ~a to find an anchor. That's the marker for an anchored object. ~I is an index marker. If I make an actual index marker with InDesign's Index panel, it looks like this:

and ~I will find it in the F/C dialog. I don't know how effectively you can change it with the F/C dialog, but that's how it is findable. This one, however - this marker with the invisible character that looks like a colon, which is in this case a hyperlink destination - you can't find with ~I:

That's what you're looking for, right? A text anchor can do a few different things all covered by Peter's script. A look at the source seems to indicate that he finds all of these text anchors by finding all of the possible things they can be - the script doesn't search the text for thingies, it makes lists of all of the possible hyperlink text sources, all of the possible hyperlink page sources, and, all of the possible cross-reference sources. If that's what you need to do, that's one possible solution.

From the other direction, I think you can search the text for <ffef> which is the Unicode value for the marker. Interestingly enough, you cannot search with GREP for \x{ffef} - instead you have to use the Text tab of the F/C dialog and search for <ffef>. This will find all of the index markers, hyperlink text sources, xref sources, and zero-width spaces in your document. Accordingly I would suggest that you avoid the use of Change All as a result.

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