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Question

How to Search without opening INDD file?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
July 22, 2024
4 replies
3198 views

How to search text in indd files, without opening it?

have atleast 50 files, & need to search words in the file, everytime I have to open all 50 indd files, and then using its find dialog box (search all documents) i get my work done. but opening 50 files every time is very much crazy. Do we have any solution for that?

How to

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Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Export any file to PDF (what you probably do anyway) and in Acrobat Pro you can use the index function.

leo.r

Community Expert

Is your goal to just find out in which documents specific words are used? Then you can try to use the standard content search tools, such as Spotlight on Mac or similar tools on Windows. (Although, depending on the words, you may get some false positives if the words also have technical use in the raw file contents.)

Robert at ID-Tasker

Brainiac

Is your goal to just find out in which documents specific words are used? Then you can try to use the standard content search tools, such as Spotlight on Mac or similar tools on Windows. (Although, depending on the words, you may get some false positives if the words also have technical use in the raw file contents.)

By @leo.r

This will work ONLY for English - if there are diacritics...

= "jeśli"

= "że"

Robert at ID-Tasker

Brainiac

i work in arabic language, with diacritics, so will it help me out?

i work in arabic language, with diacritics, so will it help me out?

By @Mr1857

Are you asking me or @leo.r ?

Robert at ID-Tasker

Brainiac

@Mr1857

If you work on a PC - you could use my ID-Tasker - not free but extremely powerful.

Whatever you are searching for, you can save as a Task and then run it on any number of files - 10, 50, 100, 1000 - it doesn't matter. You can also run it overnight...

John D Herzog

Inspiring

Does the ID-Tasker run outside of InDesign?

Robert at ID-Tasker

Brainiac

Does the ID-Tasker run outside of InDesign?

By @John D Herzog

No.

Or rather - depends on what would you like it to do.

I started with "ID" prefix - but IDT can also directly connect to Photoshop, Illustrator, WORD, Excel, PowerPoint, CorelDRAW, or any other software that can be controlled through VBA, local & online databases, FTP, send/check emails, etc. - pretty much anything you can do on a PC with Windows...

It could also do things that are available in e.g. Total Commander - file operations - or I can implement pretty much any functionality you would need.

So if the encoding of the diacritics is constant in the INDD files... IDT could first do a "binary search" - that probably would be much faster - then open only those INDD files that "meet the criteria" - and perform final search and extraction.

You can check one of the past threads, where someone had to check 11000 files - 1.3TB of files ... I can open INDD file, check if InDesign is "not responding" = corrupted INDD file, "kill" InDesign, restart it and continue on the next file...

Not possible to do it in JavaScript...

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

https://markzware.com/pagezephyr-search/how-to-search-indesign-files-content-search-pagezephyr-search-mac/#:~:text=PageZephyr%20Search%2C%20by%20Markzware%2C%20is,Watch%20this%20video%20demonstration:

Mike Witherell

leo.r

Community Expert

https://markzware.com/pagezephyr-search/how-to-search-indesign-files-content-search-pagezephyr-search-mac/#:~:text=PageZephyr%20Search%2C%20by%20Markzware%2C%20is,Watch%20this%20video%20demonstration:

By @Mike Witherell

That app - PageZephyr - has been discontinued though... I don't know if any current Markzware product offer this functionality.

John D Herzog

Inspiring

I think this is the version that is not discontinued.

https://markzware.com/idmarkz/how-to-preview-indesign-files-idmarkz-indd-file-processing-macos-app/

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