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Question

Intercalate group of paragraphs from separated lists (text frames)

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
December 17, 2024
2 replies
682 views

Both lists are separate stories.

Every line of text in its own paragraph.
Each block is already numbered.

It is possible to obtain this result?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@ana p379793058vpa

No need for a script.

The tricky part would be to convert each part into a single block - cell.

GREP "^^d^u$" -> "#$0" should work.

Then convert to a single column table with "#" as a separator.

Then put both columns together - convert to text with "paragraph" as row & column separator.

Sorry, can't check right now but it should work.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@ana p379793058vpa

Can you share an example file - just in case?

John D Herzog

Inspiring

Are the 1A,2A,1B,2B, etc. in the files or are they just for illustrative purposes?

With a script you should be able to take the 2 stories and split them by the paragraph symbol into 2 arrays. You then just need to loop through the arrays and merging the stories in order.

A

ana p379793058vpaAuthor

Known Participant

John,
Yes, you are correct. The numbers heading the paragraphs are guidelines so that the paragraphs of both texts have an assembly pattern.
We have this script but have not been able to perfect it:

#targetengine "InDesign"

var myDocument = app.activeDocument;

// Replace with the actual paths to your files

var file1Path = "~/desktop/file1.txt";

var file2Path = "~/desktop/file2.txt";

// Function to read a file and return its content as an array of lines

function readFile(filePath) {

var file = new File(filePath);

file.open("r");

var lines = file.read().split("\n");

file.close();

return lines;

}

// Read the content of both files

var file1Lines = readFile(file1Path);

var file2Lines = readFile(file2Path); // Use the path here

// Function to group the lines based on their section

function groupLines(lines) {

var groupedLines = {};

var currentSection = "";

lines.forEach(line => {

if (line.match(/^\d+[AB]$/)) {

currentSection = line;

groupedLines[currentSection] = [];

} else {

groupedLines[currentSection].push(line);

}

});

return groupedLines;

}

// Group the lines from both files

var groupedFile1 = groupLines(file1Lines);

var groupedFile2 = groupLines(file2Lines);

// Create a new text frame

var myPage = myDocument.pages.item(0);

var myTextFrame = myPage.textFrames.add();

// Combine the lines from both groups, interleaving them

var combinedLines = [];

for (var section in groupedFile1) {

combinedLines.push(section);

combinedLines.push(...groupedFile1[section]);

combinedLines.push(...groupedFile2[section]);

}

// Write the combined lines to the new text frame

myTextFrame.contents = combinedLines.join("\r");

John D Herzog

Inspiring

I feel like you will be missing the second file in the combining. I would think that you would need to push to the combined file: file 1 section, file 1 section body, file 2 section, file 2 section body. The section in that for loop would be just file 1's section and should not be a key for file 2. Right now your groupedFiles are objects of arrays. Personally I would have made them an array of objects. For example you have basically

groupedFile1 = {section1:["line1","line2","line3"],section2:["line1","line2","line3"]}

I think you would have an easier time indexing while combining with

groupedFile1 =[{section:"section 1",text:["line1","line2","line3"]}{section:"section 2",text:["line1","line2","line3"]}]

Techincally you could have already combined the paragraph text in this section to one string since you are already sorting it.

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