November 8 2008 • 11:56 AM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 090
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Read the transcript of this podcast here.
- News: InDesign Conference Master Class, ID CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts poster, ID CS4 Bugs
- Posts You Should Know About
- The Amazingly Useful and Free FindChangeByList.jsx script
- The Brazzler (aka Quizzler) Winner and Answer!
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Continued Footnotes
Sweet Deals for you:
InDesignSecrets eSeminar: What’s New in InDesign CS4, available as a recording for one week afterward you register to view it. Get $10 off by entering IDS11 in the coupon field on the registration page.
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Links mentioned in this podcast:
Posts: ID CS4 Master Page Bug, SmallCaps, Thread Between Documents, Free CS4 Movies, InDesign on Vacation
Posts: ID CS4 Master Page Bug, SmallCaps, Thread Between Documents, Free CS4 Movies, InDesign on Vacation
Cari’s article on the FindChangeByList.jsx script is in InDesign Magazine Issue #26
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Quizzler Answer for CS3 and CS4 (use GREP panel of Find/Change):
Find: \S
Change: $0
Then click the Change All button.
For CS2, use the TextCount.js script (find it in the Goodies folder of the installation CD)
Great podcast again guys, you’re doing the InDesign Community a huge service. Two and half years ago I didn’t know anything about InDesign, but I had to learn it fast. When I found this site it was like all my Christmas’s had come together in one huge ball. I owe an awful lot to Anne-Marie and David, as well as the other contributors, for all the time they’ve taken with me both on posts and by e-mail (not to forget the fantastic e-seminars).
And regrettably, probably fortuitously for David and Anne-Marie, we’ve never met in person but email and eseminars are the cheapest and fastest way to travel these days
You guys do such a great job and then you dish out the fantastic prizes too. I’m really looking forward to the DVDs and I’m sure I’ll spend many hours using them.
Ni ceart go cur le cheile.
Great show – as always!
This “FindChangeByList” script is amazing! Thanks a lot for sharing this tip!
Martin
Another helpful and entertaining podcast! ‘FindChangeByList’ is fantastic, can’t believe I have missed it before!
I dug out our CS2 disks but cannot see the’ TextCount.js’ script in the Goodies folder, there used to be a link on Adobe.com for all the InDesign Script downloads but I can’t see that either now unfortunately.
Keep up the good work
Derek
BTW, I happened upon the following weblink on Cari Jansen’s page regarding the FindChangebyList script:
http://adobeindesign.ru/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/find_change_by_lists.zip
Great show! Great info!
Hello!
Great Podcast! I’ve discovered it one month ago, download, and listen all of it ;]
I’ve question about sthis script. I’ve opened FindChangeList.txt file and started to add some more actions. Some of them works. But when I tried this: {findWhat:”(\s)(.)(\s)”} {changeTo:”$1$2~S”} it didn’t work. What is wrong? This string works for me in find/change in InDesign and it find all one-letter words and place non-breaking space after them.
Thanks for podcast and help!
Greetings from Poland!
You need to escape the backslashes. There’s a note in the GREP that says you need to escape.
So Grep for space is \s
You need to write it as \\s
So you should be doing this
{findWhat:”(\\s)(.)(\\s)”} {changeTo:”$1$2~S”}
I think that will work
Thanks!
Now it works!
I’m a regular listener to your podcast, and what a podcast it is! The best part is since I’ve started listening to the podcast when you guys were at episode 80 or so, I have so many past episodes to go through so I don’t have to patiently wait for the next one!
As for this one, I think Anne-Marie should have given the even numbered podcast to David. I mean, he was pleading for it the last time and you just took it away from him (I know that he declined, but I could hear it in his voice). How about this. He does the 100th episode and so on and so forth. Okay?
A little suggestion. Can you guys use Enhanced-AAC for your podcasts and include stuff like screenshots and such as you go along? I like to listen to podcasts when I’m having lunch, and looking at a blank artwork window isn’t going to help. Also, artwork looks fantastic on the iPhone. Hows that for a feature request?
Anyway, thanks again for the show and just know, that I’m listening.
Love the podcasts and have learned a lot from them.
But why does each podcast page on this site say “The transcript of this podcast will be posted soon” when, in fact, I can go right back to Podcast #77 (May, 2008) before I can find one that actually has a transcript?
How soon is “soon”?
@Furry: Holy mackerel, are we really that far behind? Okay, we’ll get right on that. Sorry for the delay.
Nice podcast. The find-change-script is awesome, use it all the time.
You discussed a bit the problem of having two or more lists. You didnt touchs this, though:
If you have severeal lists you run, then you can use Anne-Maries method of copying/renaming the script and list for the most used lists. The reason: Now you can assign a shortcut to the script. No fiddeling around in the pallets.
I use this in our magazine – we print a lot of numbers, and since we are in Norway we dont use the “.” in the thousand-numbers. (1.000). Therefore I have made one script that puts in non-breaking character in all thousand-numbers (1 000)… Long script, but works great! No dividing of numbers in the paragraphs.
Like “15
000″
Have renamed the script and list for this (you have to go into the script as well to do find/change of listname), and assigned a shortcut. Whenever I want to run the script I hit crtl+F4. Get the “whole document/story” selection dialogue, but thats all.
If I want to run other lists – I use the script from the scripts pallet, and chose the right list.
This is great if you have people in the production that dont know about/like to use scripts. Put this in, tell them the shortcut, and they can do script without knowing.!
Very clever, Carsten, and a great example of what I was trying to explain.
I’ll write up a step-by-step for the method you and I use as a post here shortly, in case anyone is curious.
Thanks – a year since I did this, but remember that the hardest part was to identify the listname inside the js-script and change that. (Use CS2).
A neat trick that we havent come to is that one can update the list each day with the startup script (.bat in win). Hence get the same list on all machines. Nice for updating.
I was really excited when I first overheard Dave and AM mention the Find/Change script, but I think have misunderstood something…
I tried making a few Find “XX” ChangeTo “Xxx” text strings for things I usually do using manual Find/Change, but it doesn’t work.
How to I write a string for a simple text change, i.e:
Change “Program” to “Programme”
or “Director General” to “director-general”?
I often have to make copy editing changes in F/C maunally for long documents, but find it a chore having to do them one by one.
My question, can I do simple text replacements using this script, and how do I set them up? (I’ve tried but all I get is “illegal” script errors)
You can use the FC script for this. I use it for this as well (to check regular “spelling errors”.)
Look at the top of the script to see the demo there. The strings we use are like this:
{findText:”Program”} {changeText:”Programme”} once
The articles in Indesign Magazine goes into this kind of ‘programming’ in depth! Must read!
the findchangebylist.jsx is absolutely priceless. i’ve just used it to turn a 10Mb file of text (delimited by tildes and other guff) into close to 1500 pages of formatted text.
It is quite important to mention though that if having trouble with the script, try using the latest version of the script available from http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/scripting/ .
Also, its important to note Eugene’s post earlier in that GREP commands with a \ (i.e. \s for any white space) needs to be “escaped” so would need to be written \\s in the txt file.
While doing this “task” it helped to try my script on a small block of text (3-4 pages worth) before embarking on the whole nine yards, given that while my mac is fast, it ain’t THAT fast!
Thank you also David Blatner for the other invaluable tip there of renaming the text file the script initially looks for so that a prompt appears to search for a specific txt file with the relevant search variables. Without that, my scripts panel would have run out of room in no time!
Any tips for using high-end Unicode characters with the FindChangeByList script?
I often have to import Word documents with lots of greek characters which the authors have inserted in Symbol font. I’ve been trying to use FindChangeByList (the Applescript version) to change these to the appropriate character (e.g. ‘a’ in symbol font to alpha). I set my text file up to say things like:
text {find what:"a",font:"Symbol"} {change to:"alpha"} {include footnotes:true, include master pages:true, include hidden layers:true, whole word:false} Find all a in symbol font and change to alpha
(obviously I use the correct alpha character, it just won’t display here). But it inserted the wrong character (in the case of a, it inserts ‘Œ±’). This looked like an encoding problem, so I saved the list file as UTF-16 using BBEdit, and now all the script does is read the file and display it in the event log. I’m using Applescript 2.01 which is supposed to be unicode-compliant. Any ideas?
I’m wondering the same thing as Rhiannon. I’m working on German text where a hyphen did not get fixed by my FindChangeList file. It turns out that, though it looks exactly the same as a standard dash I’m used to, it’s encoded differently. So I pasted it into my FCL file and then saved it as UTF-16. The script ran without fixing this character. Any clues?
In the interface, you can insert any Unicode character in search-and-replace using Unicode notation: angle-bracket, four digits of Unicode, angle-bracket. The alpha, for example, is
Perhaps this also works when called from Applescript…?
(You can get the Unicode value for every character you need by hovering the mouse over it in the Glyphs panel, or, when it’s already somewhere in your document, by selecting just that character and looking in the Info panel.
I use some of them so much I know the codes from memory … (that alpha, for example).)
@Jongware, thanks for that useful info. But the search-and-replace example you typed didn’t show up. I’m not sure what is an angle bracket; is it a backslash (\)?
And @everyone, there’s some more info on unicode here:
http://indesignsecrets.com/type-any-unicode-character-you-want-in-indesign.php
.. the search-and-replace example you typed didn’t show up.
D’oh! Let’s try again: <03b1>