Scripting – Get contents from textframe

[nna_top]

Hi all!

What I'm trying to achieve is the following: Every page of my document has a text frame outside the document boundaries. This text frame contains the name of the product or design and it has "1" written in the script label. Now, when trying to access the contents of that frame, my code fails me.

Currently, it looks like this:

function main() {
    app.scriptPreferences.userInteractionLevel = UserInteractionLevels.INTERACT_WITH_ALL;

var _doc = app.activeDocument;
var _numberOfPages = _doc.pages.count();
var _fileName;

for (var i = 0; i < _numberOfPages; i++) {
    _fileName = _doc.pages[i].textFrames.item("1");
    alert(_fileName.contents);
}
}
main();

All I currently want is for the script to alert the contents of all the text frames with the script label value of 1. It doesn't make sense to me that I cannot access the contents of the frames with this method but I'm clearly doing something wrong here.

Any help is much appreciated!

[Manan Joshi]

Some points for your help.

• You mentioned that your textframe lies outside the page boundary then such textframe will not be captured in the page objects textframes collection. So you will have to traverse the textframes collection of either the document or maybe spread object.
• The item or itemByName methods return object with the specifed name, name is a different property than label. name property is set using the layers panel. If you are really after script label then you will have to use the label property of the object. Now since there is no query method based on label property you will have to check each object of the collection.
• If you do use the name property then you should check if _fileName is a valid object. Like below

if(_fileName.isValid)
	alert(_fileName.contents);

 -Manan

[Laubender]

Hi nna_top,

script labels refer to the label property of a frame.

item("string") or itemByName("string") refer to the name property.

This is the case for InDesign CS5 version 7 and above.

Before version 7 you could get the label's content with item("string").

So you have to do another loop through the frames of every page to find the ones that are labeled with the string "1".

You have ask if textFrames[n].label == "1" and then do the alert.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[brianp311]

I would loop through doc.spreads as Manan suggests. If you have multipage spreads, you'll have to do some work (ie by examining the frame's geometricBounds property) to know which side of the spread it's on. 

[rob day]

Every page of my document has a text frame outside the document boundaries.

Also, if the text frames are completely on the pasteboard I don’t think your pages loop will get them. You could do a single loop with the code Uwe suggested if you loop thru all page items, something like this:

function main() {
    var api = app.activeDocument.allPageItems
    for (var i = 0; i < api.length; i++){
        if (api[i].label == "1") {
            alert(api[i].contents)
        };
    };   
}

main();

If you select a text frame that is completely on the pasteboard, its parentPage returns null:

var s = app.documents[0].selection[0];
$.writeln(s.parentPage)
//returns null

[nna_top]

This worked really well! I just ran into a follow-up issue. The goal of this script is essentially to export pages based on an input number (single page or a range). When exporting, the text inside these textboxes outside the boundaries should be added to the file name. So I've now constructed this code:

function main() {

    function setFileName() {
        var _pages = app.activeDocument.pages.count();
        var _fileNameArr = [];
        for (var i = 0; i < _pages; i++) {
            var temp = app.activeDocument.pages[i].textFrames.lastItem().contents;
            _fileNameArr.push(temp);
        }
        return _fileNameArr;
    }

    alert(setFileName());

}

main();

My current issue is that for some reason the setFileName function doesn't return anything. If I set an alert inside the for loop to notify me about _fileNameArr, it works. But as soon as I leave the for loop, the alert doesn't work anymore. Any ideas?

[brianp311]

Don't complicate things with nested functions. 

function setFileName() {
        var _pages = app.activeDocument.pages.count();
        var _fileNameArr = [];
        for (var i = 0; i < _pages; i++) {
            var temp = app.activeDocument.pages[i].textFrames.lastItem().contents;
            _fileNameArr.push(temp);
        }
        return _fileNameArr;
}

function main() {
       var _arr = setFileName();
       alert(_arr);
}

main();

[rob day]

And if there are no text frames on the page there would be no lastItem— an Object invalid error:

[rob day]

I think you are running into the same problem–a text frame on the pasteboard would not be included in the pages[i].textFrames collection:

[rob day · Accepted solution]

You could try to move the pasteboard frames to get a page number.

This gets all the text frames with a null parent page, moves them to the closest page, gets the page name, and moves them back:

function setFileName() {
    var d = app.activeDocument
    d.viewPreferences.rulerOrigin = RulerOrigin.SPREAD_ORIGIN;
    var pw = d.documentPreferences.pageWidth;
    
    var b, pp, tc;
    var _fileNameArr = [];
    var tf = d.textFrames;
    for (var i = 0; i < tf.length; i++){
        //gets text frames on the pasteboard
        if (tf[i].parentPage == null) {
            tc = tf[i].contents
            b=tf[i].geometricBounds;
            //moves the frame to get the parent page number
            if (b[1] < 0) {
                tf[i].move( [-1,1] );
            } else {
                 tf[i].move( [pw-1,1] );
            }
            pp = tf[i].parentPage.name;
            tf[i].geometricBounds = b;
            
            _fileNameArr.push(pp + "-" + tc)
        } 
    };
    return _fileNameArr
}


alert(setFileName())