Search inside thousand of InDesign files.

[hack3rcon]

Hello.

I have a lot of InDesign files and I like to search some texts inside all of them. Any idea? I guess windows search can't working properly in this condition.

Any idea?

Thank you.

[Eugene Tyson]

You could use batch convert

Free script Batch convert/export InDesign documents | Peter Kahrel

Make pdfs of all files with the same name

or RTF files of all files so they all have the same name.

Then you could search those.

[Jongware]

It is technically feasible to search for plain text in InDesign, but it's rather difficult (also I cannot vouch for its accuracy, as my solution would be highly experimental).

What platform are you on? What sort of text would you be looking for? (E.g., single words, phrases, sentences, GREP syntax and so on.) What result are you looking for? (E.g., just "this text is in the document", or any/all positions, or surrounding text, or specific page numbers.)

Eugene's suggestion is very good as you can implement it right away - it would take a couple of nights to convert all of those documents to another format but on the other hand, you only have to do that once! I suggest taking a handful of your documents and converting them to RTF, then check if the concept works and you can find what you want in these.

[Steve Werner]

And to support the idea of searching PDFs instead of InDesign files, it's easy to search a folder of PDF files with Advanced Search (Edit >  Advanced Search in Acrobat Pro.

[John Mensinger · Accepted solution]

My most-used free-download application, Agent Ransack is all you need.

Agent Ransack - Free File Searching Utility

This will find text inside .indd files. SEE ALSO: Can you trace which InDesign files link to a specific image?

[hack3rcon]

Ah, I must test it.

[Mr1857]

I really appreciate ur efforts, but i work on MAC, and need dmg format to install, plus my basic language is arabic, which have lots of diacritics in it. so in indd dialog box that can be ignored, there is an option for that, can i ignore diacritics in - file searching utility also?? 

and converting all the files in .rtf or .pdf is not practical, and if I forget to convert some file in to these formats, then i will not be able to know, that i have missed this file. 

[Geоrge]

3 years for the answer, really?

Did you try Ransack utility?

[Mr1857]

its an exe file, windows application. i work on macintosh, thats .dmg. 

[Geоrge]

Try this - https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/find-change-across-all-indesign-documents-in-a-folder/m-p/11...