Comments on: Splitting Up Threaded Stories into Separate Frames

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:48:23 +0000

Sean, I believe that is what the free TextStitch plug-in from Rorohiko does! Check it out; let us know.

By: Sean Carter

Sean Carter — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:28:25 +0000

I now need the opposite. Let’s say you do this and you need them rethreaded. Or in my case, I have a 400 page document (via Data Merge), I really need the text all continuous, so I’m trying to thread 400+ pages at a time. Is this possible?

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:20:19 +0000

Matt, great catch. Wow, that is dangerous. Well, again, I think this script is best used when each frame is really self-contained.

By: Matt McCaffrey

Matt McCaffrey — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:59:57 +0000

Um, one other side effect (that I noticed from your example:

Take a look at the first threaded frame in the example. It ends with a broken (hyphenated) word. The second thread begins with the word completion.

The split frames seem to have dropped that hyphenation.

You would need to add a hard hyphen to that word once the frames were split, or else recompose things just a bit.

Still, YATIWLF!*

–Matt

*Yet Another Thing I Was Looking For

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:05:00 +0000

Thanks for that script, Adi! I have added a link to that script to your comment above for convenience.

By: Wa Veghel

Wa Veghel — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:12:15 +0000

>That said, there is an even more powerful option: The Clever TextLink plug-in from aextra software. It does way more than the script does, including giving you options for splitting stories right in the middle of a frame. It’s Clever (thus its name)!

Not for CS3 yet! Only CS2…

By: Adi Ravid

Adi Ravid — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:47:25 +0000

And let me remind you that you can find this feature in Illustrator under Type > Threaded Text > Remove Threading, so why not in InDesign?

By: Eugene Tyson

Eugene Tyson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:17:43 +0000

Mmmm.. now that I’ve got to test what I just said, it seems that just breaks the story, not split it. Why is it made so hard using the conventional tools?

By: Adi Ravid

Adi Ravid — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:11:06 +0000

In addition to the above information, I found that the standard script limited me to split all frames, so took it a step further, and wrote StorySplitter (CS to CS3 compatible), which is available for download from Adobe Exchange, that enhances your ability to control the splitting method, adding choices to split it in half by frame selection.
It’s also available as CS3 attached script, that will be uploaded soon.

By: Eugene Tyson

Eugene Tyson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:44:00 +0000

Great tips David. But alas, there’s another way, on the PC I hold down ALT when clicking the outport, then I hover over until I get these two little links and click it again, the cursor gets loaded with text, I can click anywhere and it will remake, or I can redraw a container, but I can simply press escape to unload the cursor, and the text chain is broken!