An interesting challenge — a mix of Proper User Interface, Ease of Use, Adjustability, and a side dish of How Does This Xml Stuff Actually Works.

Try this script. You must fill in the tag name of your figures in the first variable, and fill the list ‘labels’ with the attribute names you want to add/change.
The forum converts straight single and double quotes to curly ones, and you’ll have to change them back to straight before it can work. If you use the ESTK Editor to edit your scripts, you will see properly quoted text strings marked with a color, that might help.

— 8< —- script follows below

// xmlElementName contains your base XML tag
xmlElementName = “Figure”;

// attribute labels; add at will
var labels = [
“href”,
“width”,
“height”,
“label3”,
“etcetera”
];

var values = new Array(labels.length);

if (app.documents.length == 0)
alert (“uh you didn’t open any document”);
else if (!app.activeDocument.xmlTags.item(xmlElementName).isValid)
alert (‘oh there seems to be no tag named “‘+xmlElementName+'”‘);
else if (app.selection.length == 0)
alert (“ah you forgot to select anything”);
else if (app.selection.length > 1)
alert (“please one at a time only!”);
else if (app.selection[0].associatedXMLElement == null)
alert (“yeah this object has no tag to begin with”);
else if (app.selection[0].associatedXMLElement.markupTag.name != xmlElementName)
alert (‘this object is tagged but with “‘+app.selection[0].associatedXMLElement.markupTag.name+'”, not with “‘+xmlElementName+'”‘);
else
{
var obj = app.selection[0];
var w = new Window(“dialog”, “Result”);
for (i=0; i<labels.length; i++)
{
with (w.add(“group”))
{
add (“statictext”, undefined, labels[i]);
values[i] = add (“edittext”, undefined, “”); values[i].characters = 30;

prevVal = obj.associatedXMLElement.xmlAttributes.item(labels[i]);
if (prevVal.isValid)
values[i].text = obj.associatedXMLElement.xmlAttributes.item(labels[i]).value;
}
}
with (w.add(“group”))
{
orientation = “row”;
add (“button”, undefined, “OK”);
add (“button”, undefined, “Cancel”);
}
if (w.show()==1)
{
for (i=0; i<labels.length; i++)
{
prevVal = obj.associatedXMLElement.xmlAttributes.item(labels[i]);
if (prevVal.isValid)
obj.associatedXMLElement.xmlAttributes.item(labels[i]).value = values[i].text;
else
obj.associatedXMLElement.xmlAttributes.add(labels[i], values[i].text);
}
}
}

Is ’em the only single ‘uns, or are you mixing them with ‘actual’ single quotes as well?

But ‘twould be too easy, I guess, if your “actual” quoting quotes were all double — then all one’d need is look for “space apostrophe” (to avoid “can’t”, “shan’t”, and “wan’t” (yes: the latter I actually encountered)).

The only choice of applying prefixes and suffixes is to either one, or both, reference and note number. Nothing in there to specify one format for one and another for the other.

An ugly way could be to mess around with the Note paragraph style and try to get rid of the leading space. However, a quick try shows that this is a regular space — it grows and shrinks with the others on the same line. You could make it a non-breaking fixed width space …

(After some fruitless tinkering) Best is not to rely on ID’s automated systems, then. Set the right prefix and suffix for *one* of the two, and add it for the other as regular text.
If you use Prefix/Suffix for the Footnote References and your footnote text always has the same style, you can easily use Find/Change to add the parentheses around the number:

* add parentheses around the footnote marker
* copy
* in Find/Change, search for ^F in your footnote text style
* replace with ^C

There is no default shortcut for No Break. But, as Bob said, it’s easy to add one. (I second Tim’s obsvn. that Peter was not looking for the character “Non-Breaking Space.)

Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts > Panel Menu’s. Scroll down the list for “Character: No Break”. Set it to whatever you want — I use “Ctrl+Alt+B” (I think it originally did something else that wasn’t as useful). You don’t need to memorize or write down the combo; as soon as InDesign allows you to use it, you will also see the combo appear in the Character Panel menu next to the No Break item, just like any other shortcut.

In general, to locate a command quickly, it’s easier to just click the “Show Set” button. This loads the complete set of shortcuttable items into your default text editor, and then you can use its Find Text option to locate what you need.

Wait a minute. The latest demo version doesn’t have an “OK” button, it’s called “Create” instead (but you still can’t press it until you enter some characters to create).

Make sure you download the latest version, also from that same site.

Glad you like the article! This is, by the way, exactly how I learned to write scripts: start with an original working script, customize some details to fit, and then try to change it to do *exactly* what you need.

The line that’s responsible for processing tables document-wide is this one, in the function checkUserSelection:

allTables = app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem().tables.everyItem().getElements();

To process only tables in the ‘current’ story, change it to this:

allTables = app.selection[0].parentStory.tables.everyItem().getElements();

.. and to process only tables inside a text selection, try this:

allTables = app.selection[0].tables.everyItem().getElements();

Ah, so this was the “other” question. Redbook is correct, it seems all that’s needed here is a different GREP search. Use this to locate your curly bracketed remarks:

app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = “{.+?}”;

(don’t forget to straighten the quotes out)

In this case, for GREP you need to ‘escape’ the curly brackets because they are special command codes. In addition, you do not want “all that you can get” between an opening and closing curly bracket — if there is more than one set in a single paragraph, GREP will happily grab all between the very *first* opening bracket and the very *last* closing one. To prevent this, you add a ‘?’ after the ‘grab-anything’ command ‘.+’; it will now match the shortest possible match instead of the longest possible.

Try something like this. Please check if the new forum didn’t interfere with the code!

app.findGrepPreferences = null;
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = “[d+]”;
numberList = app.activeDocument.findGrep(true);

for (i=0; i<numberList.length; i++)
{
tf = numberList[i].textFrames.add({anchoredObjectSettings:{anchoredPosition:AnchorPosition.ANCHORED, anchorXoffset:”1mm”}});
tf.geometricBounds = [“0mm”,”0mm”,”10mm”, “50mm” ];
numberList[i].move(LocationOptions.AT_BEGINNING, tf.texts[0]);
tf.fit (FitOptions.FRAME_TO_CONTENT);
}