*** From the Archives ***
This article is from April 14, 2009, and is no longer current.
Is Searching by Swatch and Font Possible?
One aspect of Bridge’s interaction with InDesign that has been useful has been its ability to show the fonts and swatches inside selected InDesign files.
Since Bridge is able to show this metadata from the InDesign files I always assumed that you would be able to search by this. Unfortunately this is not the case. In CS3 and CS4 (I didn’t try CS2) I went to search in Bridge. In the search window you can specify lots of metadata items, but document swatches and fonts are not listed as an option. I tried searching all metadata for a given swatch or font, but I did not receive any results. Since Bridge is listing this metadata, it must be there somewhere. Unfortunately I haven’t found any way to search by font or swatch. Here’s to CS5!
Any suggestions?
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Hmm, in Bridge CS4, if I set the criteria to “all metadata” (last option on the list) and “contains” then enter the font name, or the PMS number of a color in my ID file, it shows up for me. Did you try that?
If I try “swatch name” then search for the PMS number it doesn’t find any results. Which makes some sense to me, since it’s grouped with “swatch group” on the list, which is an AI feature. Maybe the way AI and ID store swatches is different.
I think the swatch name has to do with ASE files too. Searching by swatch name and swatch group doesn’t work either with InDesign files.
It worked in CS2, not anymore since CS3…
I also struck out using “Swatch Name” (using CS3).
However, like Somerset, I used the “All Metadata contains” criteria for both font and swatch names, and it worked for me, as long as the swatch is actually used in the document.
If the swatch exists in the document but is not used on a page item, the search comes up empty.
A search using “Swatch Name” does work for ASE files.
As Somerset and David said, choosing All Metadata works swimmingly! I searched for C=86 in a folder and found all files contained within that had that criteria. I also successfully searched by Pantone name. Even searching for a font (Gill Sans) worked perfectly, and did so even when I typed in all uppercase letters. This worked with both Illustrator and InDesign files, so I’m not sure what could be amiss for some of you. We should investigate further.
I am happy to hear that it is working on your machines, I will have to test this out on a few other machines to find out what is going on.
You can do this with a script. A stub AppleScript demonstrating this might be like the following, which operates on open documents, but could receive its document list a different way, such as passing the list form a selection or folder contents. The individual documents could then be opened without showing the window, to avoid interface slowdown:
tell application “Adobe InDesign CS3”
set BingoList to {}
set DocList to every document
repeat with EachItem in DocList
tell EachItem
set FontList to name of applied font of stories
set SwatchList to name of swatches
if FontList contains “Myriad Pro\tRoman” and SwatchList contains “PANTONE 294 C” then
set end of BingoList to object reference
end if
end tell
end repeat
return BingoList
end tell
If you wanted to search for substrings of the name, then you would have to coerce the list to text first, like this:
. . .
if (FontList as text) contains “Myriad Pro” and (SwatchList as text) contains “294” then
. . .