Randomly assign character styles

[Matthew A]

This might sound counterintuitive, but I would like to randomly assign character styles to chunks of text.

Either to apply colour in a random way (a bit like repeating nested character styles as shown in the screenshot below— but looser) or as a way of applying 'natural' micro-tweaks to my typesetting, for example if I was to mimic how Letraset  / rubdown type would be applied wonkily...

There are lots of scripts that let me apply random variations to attributes such as character baseline, rotation etc such as Scribbler.

— but I would potentially want to randomly apply a different font via a character style, for instance...

I am essentially looking for a 'random' function for nested styles, rather than 'repeat' as shown here...

thanks as ever for your time and advice!

[Willi Adelberger]

With any rule, GREP or nested styles you will get regular applied character styles. Therefore you have manually apply randomly Character Styles.

Those rule might help you to get a sound basis to begin with.

[winterm · Accepted solution]

Well, just a try. Paragraph style has its own color (dark blue here). Additional colors added via GREP, seems quite random to me. Appearance can be adjusted by adding/removing dots at  the beginning of each regex, also changing styles order.

[Matthew A]

Hey! This is great, more than adequate for simulating randomness, but thanks!

[rob day]

Also, if winterm​'s Grep doesn't work for you try this AppleScript.

Put the Character Styles you want to randomly apply in a group folder named Random Characters, select the text, and run this script:

tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2018"
    set g to every character style group of active document whose name is "Random Characters"
    set a to every character style of every character style group of active document whose parent is item 1 of g
    set c to object reference of every character of selection
    repeat with x in c
        try
            set rn to (random number from 1 to count of a)
            set applied character style of x to item rn of a
        end try
    end repeat
end tell

Styles can be named anything—they just have to be in the Random Characters group

Here's a similar script for applying random color swatches to a selection from a swatches group named Random Colors:

tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2018"
    set g to every color group of active document whose name is "Random Colors"
    set a to every swatch of active document whose parent color group is item 1 of g
    set c to object reference of every character of selection
    repeat with x in c
        set rn to (random number from 1 to count of a)
        set fill color of x to item rn of a
    end repeat
end tell

[Matthew A]

And this implementation seems to do the trick too, many thanks!!