Hello all,

I am a seasoned JavaScript programmer, and am currently working on a project which requires a lot of work, and I'm hoping that the process can be automated using scripts for InDesign.

Essentially, here's what I want to do. I have a 5 (sometimes, but rarely, 4)-digit string. I then have three rectangles underneath the text frame which I would like to apply a swatch to, depending on the final digits of the number. Numbers 0-9 are assigned a specific colour (and swatch), and at the moment I am manually going through each rectangle, and selecting it according to the last two digits, and applying the swatch to all those selected.

I am convinced that it must be possible to automate the process using InDesign User Scripts, but I don't have a good understanding of this. Here's an example of how the colours are assigned to the special bar codes:

0 = red 1 = blue 2 = green ….

So for the following code: 12312, I would like the bars underneath to have the following colours:

blue red blue

(i.e. top and bottom row = penultimate digit; middle row = last digit).

Could anyone indicate to me how I might write a script which loops through the pages in my document, finds the codes, extracts the last two digits and then applies a swatch to the rectangle object, depending on the number…

I am confident that I could write something like this using regular JavaScript and HTML, but that having been said, I am familiar with the DOM in HTML…

Any help or pointers would be gratefully received!

Thanks,

Ben.