Reply To: Is it possible to automate text changes on individual page headers and footers?

A change (as far as the FAA is concerned) deals with any significant text change, addition, or deletion – and this includes graphics (although the only graphics we are talking about are aircraft schematics or navigational charts and these are inserted into the content as inline). Really we are talking about changes where the original meaning of the text is altered. So changing a simple typo or fixing punctuation would not need to be tracked (although some companies do track such changes).

A visual cue is also needed to show where the change is on the page. The standard visual cue is a vertical line on the outside margin of the page next to the line of text that changed. I planned to use a bullet to simulate this. These reasons combined are why I was thinking about creating a character style on new changes. I would apply the character style to any content change the FAA needed to approve, and the vertical line bullet would be part of the format of the new text character style. The new text character style remains in place until the next revision of the manual, at which time the visual cue for the older revision is no longer needed (because it has already been reviewed by the FAA). So the older content changes would have the new text character style removed (which will probably be done manually by the writer) and applied to the newly added changes.

So a script that looks for every occurrence of a character style, and then sets the revision number and modify the date to the current date only on the pages where that character style is found sounds like the way to go. No one happens to know of such a script do they?