Is there a way to find Live Caption boxes

[nermie]

I have a document with hundreds of images. Initially I used the live caption option to help pupulate my image caption boxes. Whilst this helped at the beginning, I now prefer to have the live captions turned into static captions. I have done this for many of the captions but keep finding more.

Is there a way to use the "Find" functionality to identify and locate which captions are still "Live Caption". At present, I can see no way to identify which ones are which by looking at them. I need to right click each one to check it's  status and even then, it is easy to  miss some.

Is there a grep tool or a script that I could use?

Thanks

[Eugene Tyson]

Someone made a script in this thread

Convert all live captions to static captions

https://indesignsecrets.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign.php

[nermie]

Eugene, Thanks for this

I ran the script line;

app.documents[0].textVariables.everyItem().convertToText();

as suggested as the correct answer as a plain text .jsx file.

It did not give me an error message but then again it did not seem to work. I created a new Live Caption in the document and after running the script (i think, as I just used "run script" and nothing appeared to happen), the live  caption had not been converted. I do not believe this was  nested or in a table or anything special.

Any thoughts?

[Laubender]

Hi nermie ,

look again into:

Re: Convert all live captions to static captions

Here I stated that for nested structures this line would not work.

Instead address all instances of the text variables.

One warning:

You'd convert all instances of all used text variables with that.

Maybe you do not want that.

app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().textVariableInstances.everyItem().convertToText();

Best try this on a duplicate of your document.

Best,
Uwe

[vinny38]

Laubender  wrote

One warning:

You'd convert all instances of all used text variables with that.

Maybe you do not want that.

Hi Uwe

what about testing variableType?

Something like this maybe?:

var myCaptions = app.documents[0].stories.everyItem().textVariableInstances.everyItem().getElements();
for (i = 0; myCaptions.length > i; i++) {
    if (myCaptions.associatedTextVariable.variableType.toString() == 'LIVE_CAPTION_TYPE') {
        myCaptions.convertToText();
    }
}

[Jongware]

Nice (and I'm sure it works perfectly!) but no need to convert to a string Just use

if (myCaptions.associatedTextVariable.variableType == VariableTypes.LIVE_CAPTION_TYPE)

[vinny38]

Hi Jongware

Thank you so much for the added knowledge.

I was racking my brain about how to deal with Enumerations.

[nermie]

Thanks Uwe,

That seemed to work OK,

Thanks for others who chipped in with answers as well, but Uwe's simple script seems to have worked OK.