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• • September 22, 2010 at 1:31 pm #57080
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    Hello all,

    I'm doing a slight revision of a large textbook so the page numbers have all changed. For the index, the project manager is creating an excel file with all of the current page #s in one column, and the corresponding new page #s in a 2nd column. It will look something like this:

    102 100

    103 101

    104 102

    256 251

    There isn't a single math equation that we could apply to all of them – the size of the discrepancy grows as you go up. It's a large index – the book is 700 pages.

    Does anyone know how to write a script that would find all the #s in list A and replace with all the #s in list B? If this works and saves time over doing them manually, I'm willing to pay.

    I read the topic “GREP search to increment numbers?” and that is a similar problem, but it's not quite the same and that solution didn't seem like it would work here.

  • September 23, 2010 at 7:56 am #57090
    rydesign

    Member

    This might be a job for Autoprice. We use it here mostly for pricing large catalogs but it would work for this application and since it is likely to change agian in the future it might be worth the cost. Basically you can set your current index page numbers as variable placeholders. You can set up a code in an excel document that looks for the sections you are indexing then updated it with the new number. It will place what ever is in the excel document in to placeholder. It would work like this

    Section Number Page Number

    1.2.2 100

    With the autoprice software you would tell InDesign to match the section number of the excel doc and when it finds a match update the placeholder text with the page number in column B.

    It might not be much help the round since you would still need to set up the relationships but next time it would be a matter of just linking the Autoprice to the New Excel doc. the also have another program that is called index builder that might be useful. I haven't looked into it but it would be just what you need. Downside is that they haven't updated these for CS5 yet. Check out this site.

    https://www.meadowsps.com/site/…..utions.htm

  • September 23, 2010 at 8:14 am #57091
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    Thanks – that would be a great option if I thought I'd be doing the next round of this book. But this is a large textbook publisher who's likely to send it to India next time around. We're only doing a minor repackaging for this edition so there's no budget for inserting index markers and generating a new index.

    It's pretty common that I have to pick up a book done by someone else and not set up to take advantage of things like indexing or cross refs etc. So, I'm looking for an “afterthought” option.

    It occurred to me that I could potentially export the index to a tagged text file, fire up my old G4 in Classic mode and use Torquemada to replace all of the numbers. I've never used it with Indesign tagged text, so i don't know if there would be a lot of other numbers in there that were part of the tags that I'd want to preserve, so that might be a problem. But if so, we could just strip it to plain text and reformatting it would still be faster than changing all the #s by hand.

    Is there anything like an equivalent of Torquemada that I could use on the text in OS X? Does BBEdit do this?

  • September 23, 2010 at 8:23 am #57092
    Joe C

    Member

    You could try the FindChangeByList script.

    “Loads a series of tab-delimited strings from a text file, then performs a series of find/change operations based on the strings read from the file.”

    https://creativepro.com/fin…..odness.php

  • September 23, 2010 at 9:04 am #57094
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    I use FindChangeByList all the time . . . but I thought it would be overly laborious to get all of the strings into the text file with the surrounding formatting codes.

    However, now that I think about it – everything up to, between, and following the # strings would be identical, so I suppose I could past all of that in with find/change somehow. Hmm . . . worth a try!

    Thanks – Any other ideas, please shoot!

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