Dear Adobe Forums,
I am a very experienced user of InDesign, working on CS5.5 and EPUB production. I thought that using Adobe's provided "FindChangeList" JavaScript would be timesaver for preparing InDesign files for export to EPUB. But in my experience, despite spending days of time on it and bending over backward to code my queries carefully, FindChangeList does not work without endless error messages that, as a non-programmer, I am not able to decipher. I'm very frustrated and annoyed by what should be a much more user-friendly script! After all, wasn't the whole idea of "FindChangeList" to make multiple find-and-replace operations available to a user of InDesign?
I've read Adobe's support file at the top of the FindChangeList.txt doc. Here are just a few questions.
Why does it still say InDesign CS4 when it was provided with InDesign CS5.5?
Why are there no examples of how to change one character style into another, or one paragraph style into another?
What is the full list of "FindChangeOptions" available, and why isn't it provided somewhere?
Why is there no mention of the "FindChangeList" JavaScript in your own InDesignCS5_ScriptingGuide_JS, available for download?
As just one example of how this script isn't working, I recently added the following to a script:
| text | {appliedCharacterStyle:"subru"} | {appliedCharacterStyle:"sub-title"} | {includeHiddenLayers:true, includeMasterPages:true, includeFootnotes:true, wholeWord:false, caseSensitive:false} |
| text | {appliedCharacterStyle:"subsource"} | {appliedCharacterStyle:"sub-src"} | {includeHiddenLayers:true, includeMasterPages:true, includeFootnotes:true, wholeWord:false, caseSensitive:false} |
| text | {appliedCharacterStyle:"s1"} | {appliedCharacterStyle:"sub-herb"} | {includeHiddenLayers:true, includeMasterPages:true, includeFootnotes:true, wholeWord:false, caseSensitive:false} |
| text | {appliedCharacterStyle:"s2"} | {appliedCharacterStyle:"sub-herb"} | {includeHiddenLayers:true, includeMasterPages:true, includeFootnotes:true, wholeWord:false, caseSensitive:false} |
| text | {appliedCharacterStyle:"s3"} | {appliedCharacterStyle:"sub-herb"} | {includeHiddenLayers:true, includeMasterPages:true, includeFootnotes:true, wholeWord:false, caseSensitive:false} |
When run, this returned the error message:
I don't want to get 20 responses from a mixed bag of InDesign users guessing at what's going on. What I need is for Adobe to tell me where is the information needed to run this script properly?
I thought the whole point of "FindChangeList" was to quickly do batch changes. So far, it's been anything but. Either get this script working, provide the proper documentation, or retire it.
Thanks, Gary Niemeier