Find Change script

Hi hypons111,

if the scope of findGrep() is the document I wonder if the order of found texts is always the one you like to see.

If the order is no issue, then you are good to go. Otherwise one would need a different approach where the order of found texts is the order you like to see, e.g. in a geometrical order from right to left and top to down on a given page. For that you have to detect the values of baseline and horizontalOffset maybe and do a sort according to that values. Or you could convert a copy of the found text to outlines and detect the bounding box values and sort accordingly. Also note the order of parentPage to get the order of pages right.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi hypons111,

so in effect are you saying that there is no logical way to compute the new number from the old contents?

Now that brings us to a totally different solution where you need to use a list.

How could that work?

You could do a table in InDesign, a second document behind the one you want to change the contents.

A table with two columns. Column one entries are the old number expressions, column two entries are the new number expressions just like that:

Next step woul be:

Make the other document the active one.

Have no other documents open, just the two.

Then run this ExtendScript script snippet.

It will pull the data from the document's table that is not the active document.

Column 1 contains the old text, column 2 contains the new text.

The script will then run on the active document with a loop and does find/change text actions according to the contents of the table in the other document:

var mySourceTable = app.documents[1].stories[0].tables[0];

var myListOldArray = mySourceTable.columns[0].contents ;
var myListNewArray = mySourceTable.columns[1].contents ;


var target = app.activeDocument;

app.findTextPreferences = null;
app.changeTextPreferences = null;

for( var n=0; n<mySourceTable.rows.length; n++  )
{

	app.findTextPreferences.findWhat = myListOldArray[n] ;
	app.changeTextPreferences.changeTo = myListNewArray[n] ;
	target.changeText();
	
	app.findTextPreferences = null;
	app.changeTextPreferences = null;

};

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Now I'm confused.

Please give an example with a couple of numbers.

Number Old > Number New

If there is no rule how to change a particular number you cannot automate this.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

If its just about find and replace, why not just use the FindChangeList script, just create an entry for each replacement with as targetted a grep expression as you can. So as Uwe mentioned the logic is the key, if you make the grep expression targetted enough to only match the instance that you need then it should be fine.

-Manan

Hi hypons111,

changeGrep() is exactly working this way.

You could fetch all texts that match your search using method findGrep() instead and loop the result texts array to change every result individually. FWIW: You did not tell the algorithm for the right result, the recipe for how every single found text should be changed.

DOM documentation compiled by Jongware:

http://jongware.mit.edu/idcs6js/pc_Document.html#findGrep

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )