How to get full paragraph number as displayed on the page in ExtendScript

Sure thing. It’s quite a simple script and not thoroughly tested (I just left it alone when it worked), but it should work in most documents, as far as I can guess.

Note the bit at the top where you will have to insert values to match your InDesign document: what you want your Edit → Undo menu to say after running the script, what paragraph styles have the numbers you want to extract, what space delimiter you have between the numbers and the contents of the paragraph, and what you’ve called the object style that is to hold the ‘hidden’ paragraph numbers. You have to have set up your paragraph styles and this object style before running the script.

You can copy-paste the script below into a new file (plain text only, so don’t use Word or anything like that), call it something like “Add hidden paragraph numbers.jsx” (whatever you want, just use the extension .jsx), add the script to your Scripts menu and then you can run it.

Alternatively, you can download the attached file and put it into the Scripts folder (as described in the article linked to above). Note: Unfortunately, we can’t upload .jsx files here, so if you choose this option, you have to change the downloaded file’s extension from .txt to .jsx before running the script.

The script:

/** VARIABLE NAMES THAT MUST BE SPECIFIED BEFORE USING THE SCRIPT
 *  Each variable is preceded by a comment that describes what the variable is used for
**/


// [string] scriptUndoName: The name that will appear in your “File” → “Undo” menu after running the script
var scriptUndoName = "Add hidden paragraph numbering for running headers";

// [array] paragraphStyleNames: An array of names of the paragraph styles in your document that contain numbering and should have the hidden numbers added
var paragraphStyleNames = ['Heading 1', 'Heading 2', 'Heading 3', 'Heading 4'];

// [string] hiddenNumbersObjectStyleName: The name of the object style you have set up for the text frames that contain your hidden paragraph numbers; should be set to non-printing
var hiddenNumbersObjectStyleName = 'Headernummer';

// [string] paragraphNumberingDelimiter: Whatever character you have set in your Bullets and Numbering section between the numbering and the content – usually an em space, a tab, etc.
// NOTE: Has to be a JavaScript notation of the character, not the InDesign code for it; so a tab is either "	" (a literal tab) or "\t", but not "^t" as in InDesign
var paragraphNumberingDelimiter = "\t";


/*** END VARIABLES - LEAVE THE REST OF THE FILE ALONE ***/





Array.prototype.indexOf = function (item) {
	var index = 0, length = this.length;

	for (; index < length; index++) {
		if (this[index] === item) return index;
	}

	return -1;
};



app.doScript(init, void 0, void 0, UndoModes.ENTIRE_SCRIPT, scriptUndoName);




function init() {
	var doc = app.activeDocument;
	var stories = doc.stories;
	var styles = doc.paragraphStyles;
	var paras, p, s, frame, ip, txt;

	for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; i++) {
		paras = stories[i].paragraphs;

		for (var j = 0; j < paras.length; j++) {
			p = paras[j];
			s = p.appliedParagraphStyle;

			if (paragraphStyleNames.indexOf(s.name) !== -1) {
				ip = p.insertionPoints.previousItem(p.insertionPoints.lastItem());
				txt = p.bulletsAndNumberingResultText.replace(paragraphNumberingDelimiter, '');

				frame = ip.textFrames.add({
					appliedObjectStyle: doc.objectStyles.item(hiddenNumbersObjectStyleName),
					contents: txt
				});
			}
		}
	}
}