Thread Text Frames Across Document by Object Style Name

[Farhan Naseer]

Hi all, hope everyone is well!

Would appreciate some help fixing this script. I have a document with many text frames with object styles. I’m looking for a script that will thread text frames that have the same object style name. When new pages are added to the document then the script could be run to link the newly created frames. (So I guess it would have to activate master page items too?)

The following script was pieced together from 2 different scripts I found online. It works in finding the frames and in threading them but the sequence of the frames is not correct.

The sequence works fine if the objects are on the same page and neatly stacked on top of each other.. But if not then it produces 1,3,5,2,4,6 and even 6,5,4,3,2,1 when on different pages.

Would appreciate help with fixing this, Thanks!

(PS. I'm not a programmer or that familiar with scripting so it is highly possible that parts of the frankenstein srcipt may not be necessary!)

(PSS. Just want to give credit to Jongware for the orginal script. It was made by combining (or butchering) 2 scripts he wrote. (Though he may not know it!)
 

__________________

for(p=0; p<app.activeDocument.pages.length; p++){
var combineMe = new Array;
app.findObjectPreferences = null;
app.findObjectPreferences.appliedObjectStyles = "Style";
found_list = app.activeDocument.findObject(true);
for (a=0; a<found_list.length; a++)
{
if (found_list[a] instanceof TextFrame)
combineMe.push(found_list[a]);
}
combineMe.sort (function (a,b) { return (a.geometricBounds[0] < b.geometricBounds[0]) || (a.geometricBounds[0] == b.geometricBounds[0] && a.geometricBounds[1] < b.geometricBounds[1]) ? -1 : 1; } );
for (i=0; i<combineMe.length-1; i++)
{
if (combineMe[i].nextTextFrame == null)
{
nextFree = i+1;
while (nextFree < combineMe.length && combineMe[nextFree].previousTextFrame != null)
nextFree++;
combineMe[i].nextTextFrame = combineMe[nextFree];
}
}
}

[brianp311 · Accepted solution]

When you're calling 

found_list = app.activeDocument.findObject(true);

even though you think you're working by page, you're actually finding all matched objects throughout the document and adding them to the array. There's probably more efficient ways of going about this, but I would just search the whole document once, rather than iterating through pages. The following adds to the sort method a check to see if they are are on a previous page, then just relinks everything: 

var sortFrames = function (arr) {
    arr.sort(function (a, b) {
        if (a.parentPage.documentOffset < b.parentPage.documentOffset) {
            return -1;
        }
        else if (a.parentPage.documentOffset > b.parentPage.documentOffset) {
            return 1;
        }
        else {
            if (a.geometricBounds[0] < b.geometricBounds[0]) {
                return -1;
            }
            else if (a.geometricBounds[0] > b.geometricBounds[0]) {
                return 1;
            }
            else {
                if (a.geometricBounds[1] < b.geometricBounds[1]) {
                    return -1;
                }
                else if (a.geometricBounds[1] > b.geometricBounds[1]) {
                    return 1;
                }
                return 0;
            }
        }
    });

};

var combineMe = new Array;
app.findObjectPreferences = null;
app.findObjectPreferences.appliedObjectStyles = "Style";
found_list = app.activeDocument.findObject();
for (a=0; a<found_list.length; a++) {
    if (found_list[a] instanceof TextFrame) {
        combineMe.push(found_list[a]);
    }
}

sortFrames(combineMe);

for (var c = 0; c < combineMe.length - 1; c++) {
    try {
        combineMe[c+1].previousTextFrame = null;
        combineMe[c].nextTextFrame = combineMe[c + 1];
    } catch(e) {}
}

Now with testing 🙂

[Farhan Naseer]

Hi Brian!
Thank you very much! It seems to work perfectly. I've tested in LTR & RTL documents.👌🏼

[brianp311]

Great. FYI, this might break if any text frames are on the pasteboard. 

[Laubender]

Hi Brian,

this will break if any text frames are found on the pasteboard.

In that case parentPage will return null instead of a page object.

Also note:

If a text frame is found on a master page, parentPage.documentOffset will return -1.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )