In this week’s InDesignSecrets video, David Blatner shows you an easy way to clean up your text in InDesign using a built-in script. The FindChangeByList script removes unwanted spaces and returns, changes double-hyphens to dashes, and more by simply running this customizable script that is already inside of InDesign!
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This article was last modified on August 29, 2025
This article was first published on February 12, 2020
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Larry, it’s there. It’s just a couple folders down. Open the Scripts folder > Samples > JavaScript and you’ll find it there.
Thanks, Steve! I realized that since this is taken from a live event, it’s not obvious which folder David was already working in. Sorry about that, Larry!
This script is described as built-in, but I don’t see it in InDesign CC 2019. DO I need to download it? Where can I do that?
I had a long book manuscript that had double paragraph returns and the script did NOT work on them. It wasn’t until I looked at the hidden characters that I saw there was a non-breaking character in front of the second paragraph returns throughout the book. So, I did as you suggested and changed the script with TextEdit, but I had to put the new rule at the top because there is already a rule to replace double returns in the script. Once I ran my modified version, it was perfect and removed all the non-breaking spaces first and then the double returns were replaced by a single return. Thanks for this great tip! Very useful!