Get all text by Character Styles name

[samuelherzog]

How can i get all text that have the same Character Styles by the Character Styles name with indesign script?

[Robert Kyle]

I've always used Adobe findText (or findGrep). Like this:

var charStyleName = "YourStyleName";

app.findTextPreferences = NothingEnum.NOTHING;

app.findTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = app.activeDocument.characterStyles.item(charStyleName);

var foundText = app.activeDocument.findText();

As Capt. Obvious might say: charStyleName must be a valid style name for the active document. foundText will be an array of text objects using that character style.

If there's a way to test all of the text objects in the document, I'd like to know what it is.

Bob

[Mathisse]

Hi!

I'm trying to cycle through multiple character style folders/groups. They all have the same character styles inside them, for alternative layouts, here I need to do a findText for "asdf":

styleGroupList=["style1","style2","style3"]
styleGroupListLength = styleGroupList.length;

for (i = 0; i < styleGroupListLength; i++) {
  // csg = Character Style Group
  csg = app.activeDocument.characterStyleGroups.itemByName(styleGroupList[i]);
  app.findTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = csg.characterStyles.itemByName("asdf");
}

But the last line keeps returning an "Object is invalid"-error. I think it has trouble with the combination of findTextPreferences and character style groups.

Somewhere else in the script, csg works:

var asdf = csg.characterStyles.itemByName("asdf");

And findTextPreferences does work without csg in the script above:

app.findTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle = app.activeDocument.characterStyles.itemByName("asdf");

So it seems to have to do with the combination.

Any clues...?

Thanks & all the best,

Mathisse

[Jump_Over]

Hi,

Use app.findTextPreferences.appliedCharacterStyle in a loop.

I mean iterate through all charStyles in a doc and change this preference each step.

Method doc.findText() will return an array with all (continious) texts with current charStyle applied.

Jarek

[Laubender]

Hi Matthisse,

you could access all character styles with:

app.documents[0].allCharacterStyles

That returns an array of character styles.

Loop that array to get all character styles with that particular name ( "asdf") and store them into a new array.

Then loop that array to do whatever you like to do with the found instances of character style "asdf".

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )