Apply a character style to any random letter in story

[annaf92690288]

Hello!

I'd like to create a script that can select a random character in my story and can then apply a character style to that selection.

It would be great if I could choose the "amount" of randomness... for example I could assert that 30% or 80% of all the characters can be changed to the character style.

I found this other post but haven't had any luck running this script.
https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/randomly-assign-font-to-characters/m-p/11473695?page=1#M3980...

Thank you!

[Laubender]

Hi Anna,

what did you try so far with your own coding in ExtendScript?

You could try this with method anyItem() of the characterStyles collection of a document.

To demonstrate this, run the following script snippet on selected text:

app.selection[0].appliedCharacterStyle = app.documents[0].characterStyles.anyItem();

Run it more than one time and observe if the applied character style will change.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[annaf92690288]

Hi! Thanks for helping

So I applied this to all of my text and the character style was applied to the entire selection. How can I tell InDesign to randomly pick letters?

[Laubender]

However, if you want only quasi-randomness, where I'm not sure what that means, you could perhaps include a counter that checks how often the same style is used and repeat the action if the styles are not used often enough.

Or you could limit the characters in a given range of characters that should be changed. Hm. So, please explain exactly what you expect from an "amount" of randomness that affects 30% or 80% of all the characters. How many changes should happen e.g. in a text with 100 characters? Should white space characters be involved as well?

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[annaf92690288]

It would be great if out of 100 characters, only 30% would be changed to italics. However, those 30 letters would have to be chosen randomly throughout the entire text, which is 100 characters.