How to determine which column a certain character is in for a text with three columns?

Moving goal posts. . .

> But this can only mention the characters in [], but many do not have [] identification.

It would have been useful if you had mentioned this straight away.

> Character style extraction index needs to be specified.

Which character styles? Be precise and complete.

> Some paragraph styles also need to be extracted.

Again, which?

> Some paragraph styles span an entire paragraph, so there is no need for abc after the page number

Paragraph styles always target entire paragraphs, that's why they're called paragraph styles.

That references to them therefore need no column identifier doesn't make sense to me, but, oh well.

Anyway, you can't expect more in this forum than you got now. Time to hire a script writer and sort out exactly what you want.

I am weak. I can't resist indexes. The script below looks for all words wrapped in brackets and stores their locators (page numbers and column ids). That's the easy part. Then it sorts the locators by page number and column id, and sorts the index. That's a bit more involved. Finally, it outputs the index as a single string into a new document.

(function () {
  
  // Set a regex to look for words wrapped in brackets
  
  app.findGrepPreferences = null;
  app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = '\\[\\K.+?(?=\\])';

  var index = {};
  var index2 = [];
  var stories = app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().getElements();

  // Return an object like this:
  // A term followed by an array of locators,
  // where each locator is an object
  // index[worda]: [{folio: 23, letter: b}]
  // index[wordb]: [{folio: 13, letter: a}, {folio: 15, letter: c}]

  function getIndex (story) {
    var o = {};
    var term;
    var frame;
    var pageNum;
    var columnId;
    
    var terms = story.findGrep();
    for (var i = 0; i < terms.length; i++) {
      try {
        frame = terms[i].parentTextFrames[0];
        pageNum = terms[i].parentTextFrames[0].parentPage.name;
        
        columnId = story.insertionPoints.itemByRange (
          frame.insertionPoints[0].index,
          terms[i].index
        ).textColumns.length-1;
        
        term = terms[i].contents;
        o = {
          folio: pageNum, 
          letter: String.fromCharCode (columnId+97)
        }
        
        // If the term is already in the index,
        // add the page
        if (index[term]) {
          index[term].push(o);
        } else {
          index[term] = [o];
        }
      } catch (_) {
        // Probably found something in overset text
      }
    }
  }

  // Sort by folio and letter
  // This may raise some eyebrows,
  // but it works fine.

  function objSort (a, b) {
    return Number(a.folio) - Number(b.folio) || a.letter > b.letter;
  }

  //------------------------------------------------------
  // Assemble the index

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


  // If a term has two or more page references, sort them.
  // Transform the index into an array,
  // and add the term into the elements 
  // so that we can sort the index.

  for (i in index) {
    if (index[i].length > 1) {
      index[i].sort (objSort);
    }
    
    index2.push ({
      term: i,
      pp: index[i],
    });
  }

  // Sort the index by term

  index2.sort (function (a, b) {
    return a.term > b.term 
  });

  // Create output string

  var s = '';
  var j, refs;
  for (i = 0; i < index2.length; i++) {
    s += index2[i].term + ' ';
    refs = index2[i].pp;
    for (j = 0; j < refs.length; j++) {
      s += refs[j].folio + refs[j].letter + ', ';
    }
    s += '\r';
  }

  // Remove line-final commas (ugh)

  s = s.replace(/, (?=\r)/g,'');

  // Now place it somewhere.
  // To be threaded manually

  app.documents.add().textFrames.add ({
    geometricBounds: [0,0,'20cm','20cm'],
    contents: s,
  });

}());

> I don't like the indexing function that comes with the system because it's too difficult to use.

I'd be interested to know why you think it's difficult to use.

What you're after shouldn't be too hard to script: Look for all the words/phrases in brackets and collect the page number they're on and the column index they're in.

Another way would be to check  HorizontalOffset. 

Hi @dublove ,

can you show a typical spread of your layout?

( Hidden characters visible, frame edges visible. One text frame selected so we can see how it is threaded. )

Are there any split or span paragraphs?

Are there any tables that contain text that should be indexed with a, b or c for the specific column?

Oh. And this question is really important to answer:

Does this layout use text frames with three columns?

Or is the text running through three different text frames per page?

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

This one may well be slower, no idea, but it certainly is less typing!

frame = app.selection[0].parentTextFrames[0];

frame.parentStory.insertionPoints.itemByRange (
  frame.insertionPoints[0].index,
  app.selection[0].index
).textColumns.length-1;

Of course, it ignores spans and splits.

P.

Hi @dublove,

Given a Text instance (e.g. a word, or some selection), you can use its textColumns[0] property to identify the TextColumn it belongs to. Then, relative to the parent text frame, you need to retrieve the corresponding index to get the column number. (Maybe there is faster method but I'm not aware of an intrinsic property of the TextColumn object that would tell its number.)

Here is a basic code for testing the idea:

function getColPos(/*Text*/tx,  a,x,i)
//----------------------------------
// Return the column position (0-based) of a Text instance.
// => uint [OK]  |  -1 [KO]
{
   // Array of column indices.
   // ---
   a = tx.parentTextFrames;
   if( !( a && a.length ) ) return -1;
   a = a[0].textColumns.everyItem().index;

   // Particular column index of `tx`.
   // (-1 deals with overset text.)
   // ---
   x = tx.textColumns[0];
   x = x.isValid ? x.index : -1;

   // Find the column number i (0-based).
   // ---
   for( i=a.length ; i-- && x != a[i] ; );
   return i;
}

// TEST (Assuming a word is selected.)
// =======================================
var tx = app.selection[0];

var colNum = 1 + getColPos(tx);
var sample = "`" + tx.contents + "`";
if( colNum )
   alert( sample + " found in column #" + colNum );
else
   alert( sample + " is not visible" );

Best,

Marc