The undersigned

At work I am currently designing and setting the Icelandic bible - really a huge amount of text.

It isn’t the first time I do a bible, so I am used at handling that great amount of text, but I have been thinking of scripting a little to relieve some of the bigger manual tasks, such as removing verse number 1 from every chapter, and moving numbers around in general.

Search and replacing is easy in InDesign, you can easily remove spaces after all occurrences of the digit “1″ by searching for “1 ” replacing with “1″ - but what if you want to do it with all digits and not just 1?

You have the possibility of searching for wild cards such as “any digit” (^9), “any letter” (^$) etc, so my logic tells me to search for “^9 ” replacing with “^9″ - but no - InDesign won’t let you replace with the wild card - you are stuck.

Adobe InDesign tabbed text format

I have worked a little with scripting in AppleScript for InDesign, and it made things like this quite easy. The only problem is that scripting takes a little time to learn, so I thought up a faster (in my opinion) way of doing it.

1. Place the text marker in a text frame.
2. Choose “Export” from the file menu, selecting “Adobe InDesign Tagged Text” as the output format. (This will output the whole text-story the text frame is a part of.)
3. Choose Verbose and ASCII
4. Open up the txt file in an editor such as SubEthaEdit or TextMate and search/replace using regular expressions
5. In InDesign select all text (Command+A/Ctrl+A) and delete it. Place the txt you just worked with - everything is back as before, since the tabbed text format saves all information (styles, manual kerning etc)

The tabbed text file includes everything, such as paragraph styles, character styles, manual changes to kerning, font etc. which also will make it easy to change a kerning based on the first letter in the paragraph (e.g. if there is a large amount of uncial’s.

Just a quick InDesign tip - I hope someone will find it useful. I can make further examples if there is any requests for it.

And by the way, I am sorry about the lack of activity on the blog, my blogging time is limited due to a great amount of work etc. but I will return actively again as soon as possible.