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• • August 22, 2022 at 1:38 pm #14370874
    Alicia

    Participant

    Hello, I wonder if anyone has a snappy way to spot tracking in excess of a maximum value. In our series the maximums are +15 to -15 units of tracking, and it would be great to easily find text where an amount outside that range was used.

    Find/Change doesn’t seem to work well for searching for individual values (CC 2020 on mid2012 Mac Pro running High Sierra). For example, a paragraph is tracked at +25 and Find/Change says that it can’t find a match for Basic Character Formats: Tracking: 25.

    The H&J Violations highlighting in Preferences doesn’t reliably highlight the problem text.

    Is there a script or other method that people have found?

    Thanks!

    CC 2020 on mid2012 Mac Pro running High Sierra

  • August 22, 2022 at 2:13 pm #14370875
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    So you don’t want to be alerted when tracking is +14 but you do at +16, right? That could be done with scripting, of course, but I don’t know of any good way to do it with the built-in tools.

    • August 23, 2022 at 6:27 am #14370882
      Alicia

      Participant

      Yes, that’s it. Okay, good to know, thanks!

  • August 23, 2022 at 6:21 am #14370881
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    I’m on CC 2022 and it’s able to Find tracking of a specific value. Are you sure the Find What and Change To fields are empty, and the scope is set correctly (e.g., to story or document)?

    Also a quibble, the Preference setting for flagging tracking is not the H&J Violations attribute but the Custom Kerning and Tracking attribute. I’m guessing you knew that. That highlighting preference can’t distinguish between +1 or +50 though, it all gets highlighted in green. If the style itself has a tracking measure, it still gets highlighted but in a lighter green. Local tracking changes made there or elsewhere are a dark green. Perhaps that could help.

    AM

    • August 23, 2022 at 6:50 am #14370883
      Alicia

      Participant

      Thanks, Anne-Marie! Yes, I tried again making sure the Find What and Change To fields are empty and the scope is set correctly, and I get the same result. A co-worker gets the same result as well.

      I misspoke about flagging the tracking: I should have said that the H&J Violations highlighting doesn’t alert us to the extra-loose spacing. It highlights the problem text but not with the top-level highlight that we examine and fix.

      Custom Kerning and Tracking does highlight the problem text but as you say it doesn’t distinguish between units of tracking.

    • November 1, 2022 at 10:17 am #14374228
      Alicia

      Participant

      Hi, Anne-Marie,

      Here is a new wrinkle on this issue:

      While searching for specific values within those ranges in ID 2022, we noticed that searches for tracking from 1 to 8 and -1 to -8 produced hits, but searches for 9 to -9 tracking and above (10 to 15 and -10 to -15) resulted in no hits despite paragraphs being tracked at those values.

      Does that seem like a bug?

      Thanks, Alicia

  • November 1, 2022 at 12:53 pm #14374236
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    @Alicia: How are you searching for tracking from 1 to 8, or 10 to 15, etc? Are you searching for 1, then 2, then 3, etc?
    I just applied a tracking of 20 to some text and did a search for text that has tracking of 20 and it worked fine.

  • November 1, 2022 at 1:26 pm #14374241
    Alicia

    Participant

    Hi, David,

    In the Find/Change window, Text search of the Document, Find Format: Basic Character Formats: Tracking: -15, other fields left blank

    The search returns “Cannot find match”, but there is a paragraph with -15 applied to part of a paragraph. When I apply the tracking to the entire paragraph, it is able to find it. However, with some values it finds the specified tracking whether it is part of a paragraph or the whole paragraph.

    Thanks,

    Alicia

  • November 1, 2022 at 1:55 pm #14374247
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    It’s hard to know, but my first thought would be that the tracking might be 15.0001 or something like that. I’ve seen situations where text has been scaled, for example, where it doesn’t have an even integer value, and Find/Change won’t find it.

  • November 1, 2022 at 2:04 pm #14374248
    Alicia

    Participant

    So interesting!

    In the text I’m looking at, the text is scaled 100% vertical and horizontal. I retyped the tracking values as -15 in the tracking field and in the Find/Change window, and it still can’t find it.

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