[CS5][VB] How to apply FontStyle or CharacterStyle to a range of characters

Question

... without doing it for each character in a Story?
Selektion cannot be used becaus the document has no windows.
Any suggestions?
Thx in advance

Answer 1

If the overhead is truly doScript, then you should be able to compose
a single JavaScript that operates on your hundreds of textframes and
doScript it simply once.
Remember that in performance-critical code
what really hurts is trips between the scripting language and InDesign's
object model. If you iterate over every character, each time you touch
a character, InDesign has to construct a character object and pass it
to the scripting DOM. That's why using itemByRange is key -- it constructs
one object.
Similary, whenver you loop, you are much better off calling .getElements()
before the loop begins so that you make one call into the object model,
rather than n calls. Especially if a lot of calls are readng.
I suspect the overhead of the object construction is much worse than
the doScript.
And if that's the case, perhaps you are correct and you need an SDK plugin.
But you will make yourself a huge maintenance hassle and compatibility
problem.
But you still haven't explained. How does your application determine which
textframes and character offsets need styling? Does it need to consult
the object model to do so?