Character Values of Special Characters

[Olivier Beltrami]

I sometimes need to enter some of these from my plugin code. Do you have a list of the character values for each of these ?

Using a hex editor on an INDD file, I've been able to determine that indent here is #7, right-align tab is #8, normal tab is #9, soft return is #10, hard return is #13, etc...

But I am missing many, and in particular the "next column" and "next frame" appear as the same as a hard return in the hex editor.

Very best regards,

Olivier

[Manan Joshi · Accepted solution]

Hi Olivier,

You have found it correctly that many special characters are mapped to the same Unicode, see the following chart.

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2009/07/idcs4-special-characters

Why don't you use the special character enum in your code rather than using its Unicode value? See the following

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#SpecialCharacters.html

-Manan

[Olivier Beltrami]

Hi Manan,

Thank you very much for the 2 links.

Do I understand correctly from the 1st link that if I want to enter text into a box linked to another, I can use ^R to insert a frame break such as "text in box1^Rtext in box 2" and this will cause "text in box 2" to be in the linked box ?

I would, of course, prefer to use enums, as in your second link, but thoese enums seem to be only for scripting; I could not find them anywhere in the SDK. Did I not look properly ?

Very best regards,

Olivier

[Manan Joshi]

I have not tried it but it seems the file MetaChar.h should be of interest. It's present at the following location in the SDK

{SDK_Basepath}/source/public/includes/MetaChar.h

-Manan

[Olivier Beltrami]

Hi Manan,

Thnak you very much.

It does sound interesting, but I am not sure where to use it.

Is there a sample project that uses these metachars ?

Very best regards,

Olivier

[Olivier Beltrami]

Hi Manan,

I am still not able to insert a Frame Break.

When I insert text using 

textModel->Insert(position, &data, language);

then I am able to replace many special characters such as kTextChar_IndentToHere and kTextChar_RightAlignedTab, but for kTextChar_FrameBoxBreak, there is a comment in the SDK code that "These are used only by Find/Change, and are not stored in a document", and the result is that the string "<E00D>" appears instead of a framebreak, as shown below.

What am I doing wrong ?

Very best regards,

Olivier

[Dirk Becker]

Do not directly invoke model modifying methods, at the lowest level use commands instead. See the programming guide for details.

At a higher level, some text related commands are available thru ITextModelCmds.

For your special case I can only refer to ITextEditSuite, eventually I've just missed any Utils/Facade with a less than obvious name.

Anyway, instead of going thru a suite, you want to end up executing kInsertBreakCharacterCmdBoss.

UIDList refers to the story, IRangeData sets the offset, and for IIntData use 3.

Under the hood (no need to do it yourself) this invokes two sub-commands: kUserTypeTextCmdBoss to insert the actual character 0x000d, followed by a kUserApplyAttrCmdBoss which applies kTextAttrGotoNextXBoss with IID_ITEXTATTRBREAKBEFOREMODE set to the 3 of above - the numeric value for enum Text::StartBreakLocation … kAtFrameBox.

[Olivier Beltrami]

Hi Dirk,

Thank you very much for your suggestion.

We will try it and let you know how it goes.

Very best regards,

Olivier