You can change the Unicode in the *header line* for each character. That is where the script gets the value from. But be warned that if you change your existing font, all its current codes are off! You could bite the bullet and check your entire document again, or (perhaps preferable) you could save the adjusted font under a subtly different name. Then you can keep track of what characters are still to be changed – those in the “old” font only.

As for kerning: hum hah. Creating a kerning table out of the blue is quite hard to begin with, but aside from the technical issue, me and Marc have no idea of how we should let a user input all those values. For a typical (complete) font, there can be hundreds or even thousands of kerning pairs … Thinking out of the box, I suppose you could use a free tool such as TTX to add kerning, but I have no idea how that would work in practice.

Your Justification settings are way too strict! InDesign needs at least ONE of those three items to be variable to justify text: either word spacing or letter spacing or glyph scaling (where that last one would be “yuck”).

In your case, you should indeed set only Word Spacing to the same values. It is likely that your contradicting settings make InDesign go ‘shrug’ and just ignores what you tell it.

Ari, Edward is right. That line calls “main” but the function is called “Main”. (So to fix, change one of the two to the other.)

The steps are:

1. Make sure “Use Typographer’s Quotes” is ON in Preferences > Type.

2. Using regular text Find & Change, search for ^'.

3. Change it to '

4. This usually works because ^' looks for *exactly* the ‘straight’ quote, and replacing it with a single straight quote in “Typographer’s Quote” mode makes InDesign kick in its own smart quote replacement.

.. but (surprise surprise!) … in this case it does not work!

Now hold on (I said to myself), I am sure it works. So I changed the font to Times New Roman and it did. Changing the font back to Alegreya Sans made it Not Work.

Inspecting the font itself revealed why: it actually <i>is</i> “an OpenType thing”! In the Standard Ligatures set, Alegreya Sans <b>always</b> replaces the closing quote in a combination closing-quote (any letter) with the Straight Up Quote! This is done with an OpenType feature, and so there is nothing wrong with your attempts or with InDesign – it works “the way the font creator intended”.

[I also discovered a few other strange combinations. Type “<arriba>”, “<square>”, “<izquierda>”, “<ht>” amongst another few phrases, to see what I mean. Also, ~i gets automatically translated to ?, and a few more “tilde” codes.]

The only way to get rid of it is to disable the OpenType Feature that enables it: Ligatures. Now you don’t want to do that for all of your text (there is nothing wrong with its “fi”, “fl”, and other ‘common’ ligatures) so I suggest the following:

1. Make sure “Use Typographer’s Quotes” is ON in Preferences > Type.

2. Using regular text Find & Change, search for '.

3. Change it to ' <i>and</i> make sure “Ligatures” is switched OFF in the Change Format (Basic Formatting) field.

Especially not with such a poor level of English. Not the most convincing piece of advertising :P

Regarding the selection: if this story thread is the only one spanning multiple frames, you can loop over your stories and select the one that has a ‘next’ frame:

for (i=0; i < app.activeDocument.stories.length; i++)
{
  if (app.activeDocument.stories[i].textContainers.length > 2)
  {
     story = app.activeDocument.stories[i];
     break;
  }
}

If necessary, you can only check the ones that start on your first page:

for (i=0; i < app.activeDocument.pages[0].textFrames.length; i++)
  if (app.activeDocument.pages[0].textFrames[i].nextTextFrame &&
    app.activeDocument.pages[0].textFrames[i].parentStory.textContainers.length > 2)
  {
    story = app.activeDocument.pages[0].textFrames[i].parentStory;
    break;
  }

… if that fails as well (if you have multiple independent text threads), maybe you could search for a paragraph style that is unique to the story you need.

(For the record, I did not test it but the rest of your script looks fine.)

I do this with a GREP style that applies -120 tracking. It needs to be applied to the first 2 of the 3 dashes, but of course only when there are 3 in a row, so this needs a lookahead:

(?<!~_)~_~_(?=~_(?!~_))

That check at the end (?=~_(?!~_)) is so it will only be applied to 3 em-dashes, not 4 or more. This way you can easily see when there are too many.