The first line inside the loop sets a random baseline shift. Following the formula, it seems this sets either 0 or 1, nothing else. In your case, you want −1 to +1 and all values in between. So try this line instead:

app.selection[0].characters[i].baselineShift = 2*Math.random()-1;

The real question everyone will want an answer to … What is a “crawl”? :)

You might want to familiarize yourself with the default “1 point larger / 1 point smaller” hotkeys: Ctrl+Shift+<, Ctrl+Shift+> — “Cmd” instead of “Ctrl” on the Mac.

Also note that your example does not have all of its lines fully filled (and is this a historical example? it contains a typo: 'Achinng')

But to get you started here is a little Javascript, cobbled together in a few minutes. Select a text frame and run the script to make each paragraph fit on a single line. It works on each paragraph, separated by hard returns. It depends on the number of lines inside a paragraph, so it does not work at all with forced line breaks (Shift+Enter): no matter how small the type gets, the text would never 'fit' on a single line!

The best all-around guide is Peter Kahrel's O'Reilly Shortcut on GREP for InDesign: https://shop.oreilly.com/produc&#8230;..6156015.do

But the very short version: b is a word break, u stands for a single uppercase character, l for a single lowercase character. InDesign's GREP even recognizes Greek or Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase characters as such (not that I think Greek names to pop up in your articles — George Michael doesn't count! he's spelled in Latin!)

The '+' means “one or more of the preceding code”, so something like l+ means “one or more lowercase characters). The parentheses group stuff together in a functional unit; (ul)+ means “find one uppercase, then one or lots of lowercase characters; repeat this unit as much as possible”. As you see, GREP is quite concise compared to English :)

That would be

(?<=d)/(?=d)

— see https://creativepro.com/fin&#8230;..string.php

To get a single backslash in this editor you have to type two: \ (and thus I actually had to type this '' to make 'em both show up :) )

Back to your problem. Your GREP query works fine; it will accurately find the period inside “itle:(en-dash).(return)”. The problem is, you have some more text between your 'title' and that period — your 'bunch of characters' — and you forgot to include those in your search.

So you need to add a wildcard match to skip the actual title data. One would assume this to work:

(?<=itle:~>.+).(?=~b)

but it doesn't: a Lookbehind needs to have a fixed length, you cannot use any of the variable length specifiers (the '+' here). Most dialects of GREP do not support variable length lookbehinds — things get too fast too complicated if this is allowed.

So a workaround is needed here: find “Title”, sentence, period, and replace with just “Title” and sentence.

[ A propos, a better way of testing for 'end of paragraph' is to use the end-of-paragraph specifier '$'. Your '~b' matches the hard return at the end, and so you had to find a way to preserve it. The '$' on the other hand matches end-of-paragraph without 'selecting' the next hard return. ]

This ought to work: search for

(itle:~>.+).$

and replace with

$1

Perhaps the problem lies not in the document but in your local fonts. If one got damaged somehow (it's always a mystery to me how something like that could happen!), InDesign will appear to work correctly right until it needs that font.

Even though the foundations of Adobe are firmly fixed into font creation, InDesign cannot work with a Bad Font, and rather than issuing an error message, it crashes. Hard.

If you know what fonts are used in the document, remove them (unless they are “system fonts”, in which case you would break even more) and see if InDesign opens your document. Of course it will complain there are some fonts missing, but if it does not creash, you know the cause. Only problem at that point is to find the original files for your fonts.

Use Find/Change. Leave the text fields blank, but put something in the Find Formatting that you are sure is applied to every individual paragraph — even if it's something rare, such as a baseline shift of 0 pt. In the Change formatting field, set your text jusrification. Then use Change all, with the scope set to “Document”.