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Known Participant
July 3, 2017
Answered

Search inside thousand of InDesign files.

  • July 3, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 4061 views

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.

    Correct answer John Mensinger

    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?

    4 replies

    Participant
    January 2, 2025

    Did you Find a Solution?

    Known Participant
    January 2, 2025

    no, still waiting to find a solution. but nothing from any end. nor from the backlog developers. very sad to say. 

    John Mensinger
    Community Expert
    John MensingerCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
    Community Expert
    July 3, 2017

    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?

    hack3rconAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 4, 2017

    Ah, I must test it.

    Jongware
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 3, 2017

    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
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 3, 2017

    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.

    Community Expert
    July 3, 2017

    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.