InDesign Javascript Hyperlink question

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
May 14, 2025
2 replies
1529 views

Hi Everyone,

Please can someone help, is there a way of checking if a word has a hyperlink to a Text Anchor attached to it? I've written a script to give me a list of all the words that have a certain character style. What I'm trying to do is check each word for a hyperlink.

I've been digging down on the properties of a word but as yet I've not found what I'm looking for.

Thanks

Scripting

V

Vamitul - ks

Participating Frequently

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#Text.html#d1e461232__d1e468837

`text.findHyperlinks()` will return any hyperlinTextSource in it, but it can get slow.

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m1b

Community Expert

Hi @Vamitul - ks that is my usual approach and I haven't noticed it being slow. Are you sure that the slowness wasn't caused by something else? @Peter Kahrel is that why you do the looping?

- Mark

V

Vamitul - ks

Participating Frequently

Behind the scenes, findHyperlinks is also looping through the hyperlink objects. It's closer to the machine because it issuing the internal db structure for it, but it's still a loop.

Depending on the number of words that need to be checked, gathering all the hyperlink destinations and sources up front (more precisely, the `.sourceText` and `.destinationText` properties of them) and then checking if each of the words is part of the text can be a lot more effective. But testing if a Text object contains another Text object can be surprisingly complex (personally, I'd use resolved object specifiers for it).

—————————————————————————————Krommatine Systems — Makers of InDesign plugins, tools, and automations.