The ME (middle-eastern) version of InDesign has long had an annoying bug regarding converting text to outlines. When you select a text frame and choose Type > Create Outlines, the text is converted to an outline… but the original frame remains! This doesn’t happen in the other versions of InDesign.
(Actually, a side note: You can make the regular version of InDesign do this — convert the frame to outlines and leave the original intact — by holding down Option/Alt when selecting Create Outlines.)
Anyway, some time ago, our friend Harbs wrote a short script that does the trick. It was brought to my attention by Zaid Al-Hilali, a trainer and publishing expert at grapheast in Dubai, and a co-author with David Creamer of the InDesign CS3 ACE Exam-Aid software.
To download two scripts that will convert text to outlines and remove the original, click here. (It’s a zip file with two versions of the script… one that converts only the selected object, and one that converts everything on the current page.) Once you unzip the file, you can place the .jsx scripts inside the Scripts Panel folder (inside your InDesign application folder).
Again, you don’t need these scripts unless you have the ME version, but I hope that if you do use the ME version the scripts will make your life a bit easier.
Of course, I still don’t like converting text to outlines if I can avoid it. Here’s a discussion about the practice, and here is a good workaround that converts text to outlines in an exported PDF but leaves the text unconverted in the InDesign document.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on February 4, 2009
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