Converting Text to Emoji in InDesign with FindChangeByList

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I’ve been wondering: How am I going to change text like this:

to look like this:

The solution is pretty clear: do 1,000 find/change queries in a row. That’s not hard, right?

Well, it’s not hard if you use a tool like FindChangeByList.jsx (which comes with InDesign). But there are a couple steps in the process.

First, you need to create a character style called emoji and have it apply an emoji font.

Second, you need a findchangebylist text file that lays out all the search/replace queries you’re going to need. This is an insane task, but I woke up this morning and decided to make one. You can download it here. (Because it’s a text file, you’ll probably have to right-click on this link and choose Save As, to save it to disk instead of opening it in your web browser.)

Then, you need to put it in the proper place and rename the original findchangebylist.txt file. The “proper place” is the FindChangeSupport folder, which is inside the application scripts folder. (Open InDesign’s Scripts panel, open Application > Samples > JavaScript, then right-click FindChangeSupport and choose Reveal in…)

When you rename the original findchangebyblist.txt file, and then later run the FindChangeByList.jsx script (in InDesign’s Scripts panel, not the folder!), then InDesign asks you which txt file to use. This is your opportunity to choose the Emoji file I created (or some other one you created).

FindChangeByList is pretty fast, but this file has almost 1,000 search queries in it, so it takes 20 or 30 seconds to process (and might be much longer on a big InDesign file).