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• • November 23, 2015 at 4:22 am #79567
    Amit Schandillia

    Member

    I have an InDesign document with text styled as one of the following custom character styles throughout the document:

    – character-bold
    – character-italic
    – character-bolditalic
    – [none]

    I am trying to write a script to scan the entire document and wrap each text of a particular character style with the appropriate HTML tag, except of course the text without any assigned character style. Thus, the following text:

    The quick **brown** fox **jumps ri**ght *ov*er ***the*** lazy dog. (where, ** represents bold, * represents italics, and *** represents bold-italic character styles)

    …should look like:

    The quick <b>brown</b> fox <b>jumps ri</b>ght <i>ov</i>er <b><i>the</i></b> lazy dog.

    Is this doable? I am sure it is. I don’t mind using some kind of GREP/Find-Change method if possible. I don’t want to use “Export to HTML” because there are some custom tags that won’t show that way.

  • November 23, 2015 at 7:30 am #79570
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Sure, you should be able to use the GREP tab of the find/change dialog box to find .+ (and set it to the character formatting you want, in the Find Format section at the bottom of the dialog box. Then, in the Change To field, type <i>$1<\i>

    • November 23, 2015 at 10:37 am #79587
      Amit Schandillia

      Member

      Thank you for the quick response, David. Just tried doing as you suggested but I must be doing something stupid because the “$1” bit is replacing the text that needs to be within the tags. For instance:
      This is a nice book. (where nice is in bold)
      …turns into:
      This is a <i>$1</i> book.
      How can I make Indesign see $1 as a wildcard variable for the text being tagged?

  • November 23, 2015 at 10:36 am #79586
    Amit Schandillia

    Member

    Thank you for the quick response, David. Just tried doing as you suggested but I must be doing something stupid because the “$1” bit is replacing the text that needs to be within the tags. For instance:

    This is a nice book. (where nice is in bold)

    …turns into:

    This is a <i>$1</i> book.

    How can I make Indesign see $1 as a wildcard variable for the text being tagged?

  • November 23, 2015 at 11:04 am #79588
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Perhaps you’re not in the GREP tab of the Find/Change dialog box? Or you put a backslash before the $ character? Not sure what else would do that.

  • November 23, 2015 at 6:14 pm #79599
    Amit Schandillia

    Member

    Worked like a charm…I just changed $1 to $0 and that did the trick. No idea how it worked but it did! I will now study more about these wildcard numbers and what they mean…seems like a mighty handy tool to me. Thanks a ton. :)

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