How to Find/Change in order of pages

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
June 21, 2019
5 replies
364 views

I'm working on a large document and need to change the first instance of an abbreviation to the spelled out words then the abbreviation in parentheses. My current process is, for example, Find "PE", change to "Professional Engineer". The problem is that the instances of "PE" are given to me in page order of 1, 7, 4, 13, 7, 2, 8, etc. I simply want it to show instances starting at the top of page 1, then 2, then 4, then 7, etc.

WHY IS THIS SO COMPLICATED? Please help!

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A

amber georgeAuthor

Participant

After doing more research, I found that InDesign is searching the text boxes in the chronological order in which the text boxes were created, not page order, and there's not way to fix it. Well that's frustrating.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi Amber,

the following scripting solution could help:

Re: Find & Replace at specific pages

It works like this:

1. Lock all items on all pages and all pasteboards of the document.

2. Unlock all items on some pages only.

Do Find/Change.

The change will only affect items that are unlocked.

3. Unlock all items on all pages and all pasteboards of the document.

To lock all items is this ExtendScript/JavaScript code snippet:

app.documents[0].pageItems.everyItem().locked = true ;

To unlock all items in the active document is this:

app.documents[0].pageItems.everyItem().locked = false ;

Regards,
Uwe

John Mensinger

Community Expert

It has always been my experience that a Find/Change does work sequentially throughout a document.

^Right.

Set a live insertion point in your first text frame on page 1 and then try again.

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

Do you have multiple sections in the document or is the whole thing a single section? That is are the repeated page numbers all from the same section of the document? It has always been my experience that a Find/Change does work sequentially throughout a document.

A

amber georgeAuthor

Participant

There are not multiple sections. I do have multiple text boxes per page that don't link to each other. I tried clicking in the very first box at the top of page 1 then doing the find/change but it's still jumping around.