Find and Change-To with Clipboard Contents in InDesign

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
September 26, 2020
2 replies
1354 views

I found this feature by accident just yesterday and was very pleased, as I needed to replace a repetitive string of text with an icon all through a book design. I just wish it worked in reverse. Now that I have my icon in place, I find it needs to be smaller, and I have no way to automatically search and replace it with a smaller icon, as the clipboard contents option is not available under the Find>Other field, only under the Change To>Other field. Any suggestions?

How to

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Correct answer Barb Binder

Hi CasinClaire:

The only thing I can think of to handle this automatically is if there is a distinguishing feature of the graphic frames that you can use to locate them with a Find/Change > Object command. InDesign has 4 tabs at the top of the Find/Change dialog box: Text, GREP, Glyph and Object. Object is used to find frames, and if you can find the frames you will be able to assign an object style to them that will resize the frame size and the content with a Change All.

Looking ahead, this is why it is so important to work with object styles. Object styles allow you to easily redefine all objects (objects and frames are synonyms in InDesign) that are using that style. When you design with styles (paragraph, character, object, cell and table styles), edits like this are quick. Without them, they can be come a nightmare.

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/object-styles.html

~Barb

Barb Binder

Community Expert

We are always happy to help, CasinClaire.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Barb Binder

Correct answer

Community Expert

Hi CasinClaire:

The only thing I can think of to handle this automatically is if there is a distinguishing feature of the graphic frames that you can use to locate them with a Find/Change > Object command. InDesign has 4 tabs at the top of the Find/Change dialog box: Text, GREP, Glyph and Object. Object is used to find frames, and if you can find the frames you will be able to assign an object style to them that will resize the frame size and the content with a Change All.

Looking ahead, this is why it is so important to work with object styles. Object styles allow you to easily redefine all objects (objects and frames are synonyms in InDesign) that are using that style. When you design with styles (paragraph, character, object, cell and table styles), edits like this are quick. Without them, they can be come a nightmare.

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/object-styles.html

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

casinclaireAuthor

Inspiring

Hi, Barb, and thanks for the reply.

You are absolutely right about object styles. I do use them as a rule.

This time, it just happened that I pulled a previously used object from a
library of flourishes that I'd been saving. After I realized what I needed
to do, and even before I posted the query, I went to Object Styles,
thinking I'd assign a style to this flourish and then resize it that way.
But just at that moment, I didn't want to flip through the whole manuscript
to find and assign each usage individually, so hoped there might be another
way. But it sounds like I am on the right/only track already, as you have
the same thoughts! 🙂 Guess I'll bite the bullet and get on with the show.
Thanks for your input. Much appreciated. 🙂

-- C.

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