D’oh! Let’s try again: <03b1>

And @everyone, there’s some more info on unicode here:
http://indesignsecrets.com/type-any-unicode-character-you-want-in-indesign.php

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).)

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?

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!

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!

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)

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’ll write up a step-by-step for the method you and I use as a post here shortly, in case anyone is curious.