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andyizzle
andyizzle
Participant
July 6, 2020
Answered

Find and swap position of period/footnote

  • July 6, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 1702 views

Hi everyone,

 

Hoping someone can help out. I have a document with about 200 references (footnotes). I need to swap the position of the full stop (or period) so that it appear after the footnote.

 

For example, the current layout is:

Sentence.Footnote

(Or with numbers: Sentence.12)

And I need:

SentenceFootnote.

(Sentence12.)

 

Is there a way to use find and replace to swap these around? I can easily find the instances by using 

.^F

but I don't know enough to code the swap. I don't fancy manually searching through 200 references to fix them all!

 

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Andy

    Correct answer Peter Kahrel

    There must be scripts around to do that. but it's easier to rekey it than to look for it:

     

    app.findGrepPreferences = app.findChangeGrepOptions = null;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '[[:punct:]]~F';
found = app.documents[0].findGrep();
for (i = found.length-1; i >= 0; i--) {
   found[i].characters[0].move (LocationOptions.AFTER, found[i].characters[1]);
}

    This one swaps any punctuation and a following footnore number. Maybe the script should cater for strings of punctuation.

     P.

    3 replies

    S
    salomonq
    Participant
    May 3, 2025

    What are you supposed to do with these scripts. I tried entering them in "find and replace," but it doesn't work.

    Robert at ID-Tasker
    Robert at ID-Tasker
    Legend
    May 3, 2025
    quote

    What are you supposed to do with these scripts. I tried entering them in "find and replace," but it doesn't work.


    By @salomonq

     

    https://creativepro.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign/

     

    Peter Kahrel
    Community Expert
    Peter KahrelCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 24, 2023

    To move anchors after a parenthetical following them, use this:

    app.findGrepPreferences = null;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '~a\\(\\w{1,3}\\)';
found = app.documents[0].findGrep();
for (i = found.length-1; i >= 0; i--) {
  found[i].characters[0].move (LocationOptions.AFTER, found[i].characters[-1]);
}

     

    andyizzle
    andyizzleAuthor
    Participant
    July 6, 2020

    Some example images of the text as it is:

     

     

    And how it should look after:

     

    Peter Kahrel
    Community Expert
    Peter KahrelCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
    Community Expert
    July 6, 2020

    There must be scripts around to do that. but it's easier to rekey it than to look for it:

     

    app.findGrepPreferences = app.findChangeGrepOptions = null;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '[[:punct:]]~F';
found = app.documents[0].findGrep();
for (i = found.length-1; i >= 0; i--) {
   found[i].characters[0].move (LocationOptions.AFTER, found[i].characters[1]);
}

    This one swaps any punctuation and a following footnore number. Maybe the script should cater for strings of punctuation.

     P.

      andyizzle
      andyizzleAuthor
      Participant
      July 7, 2020

      Hi Peter,

       

      Many thanks for your reply. It took me a little while to figure out what to do with that code – I'm a complete novice when it comes to scripts! But once I had figured out how to get it into a suitable format and imported in to InDesign, it worked like a charm. So thanks again. 

       

      The only improvement would be if it could specify which type of punctuation – in this case I had some brackets and quotation marks that got swapped along with the full stops.

       

      Andy

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