Find to end of document or story

Question

Is there a way to limit the find text so that it only goes to the end of the document or story?
When the cursor is planted in text the find dialog has a "To End of Story" option but I don't see any thing equivalent in the scripting. Of course, finding this stuff hasn't been by InDesign scripting forte.
Thanks,
Ken

Answer 1

Olav Kvern wrote:
main() 
on main() 
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS4" 
if (count documents) is not equal to 0 then 
set mySelection to selection 
if (count mySelection) is 1 then 
if class of item 1 of selection is insertion point then 
my myFindChangeToEndOfStory() 
end if 
end if 
end if 
end tell 
end main 
You know, e e cummings had nothing on you.
This is poetry, really.
It's maybe being a little overly picky about when it's going to do its thing, but in such a charming way. Reminds me of 
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1p48e_emily-loizeauhommage-a-j-prevert_creation (translation at 
http://olisipus.blogspot.com/2006/11/pour-faire-le-portrait-dun-oiseau.html).
on myFindChangeToEndOfStory() 
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS4" 
--Clear find/change preferences 
set find text preferences to nothing 
set change text preferences to nothing 
set find what of find text preferences to ".  " 
set change to of change text preferences to ". " 
Or:
set findText to text returned of (display dialog "Find what:" ¬
buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button 2 default answer "")
set changeText to text returned of (display dialog "Change to:" ¬
buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button 2 default answer "")
set find what of find text preferences to findText
set change to of change text preferences to changeText
You don't know of a way to have the cursor come up in the first dialog if this is run from Script Editor, do you? It doesn't matter since if I used this it would probably only be via the scripts palette, but I'm curious anyway.
set myStory to parent story of item 1 of selection 
set myIndex to index of item 1 of selection 
--Here's how you'd select it: 
--select text 1 of text from insertion point myIndex to insertion point -1 of myStory
If you really wanted to but you don't. Okay.
--do a find/change 
tell text 1 of text from insertion point myIndex to insertion point -1 of myStory
I see what you're doing, but I don't understand text 1 of text. Is there a text 0, -1, -2 of text?
change text 
end tell 
--Clear find/change preferences 
set find text preferences to nothing 
set change text preferences to nothing 
end tell 
end myFindChangeToEndOfStory
And they all lived happily forever after.
One thing with AppleScript--because AppleScript assigns a *string* to the variable myText when you do something like this: 
set myText to text 1 of text from insertion point myIndex to insertion point -1 of myStory
I was going to ask what text was if not a string, but I guess I can put that up in the Script Editor result pane and see for myself.... Hmm, text 1 of text and text yield identical results, and it works with simply text as well. So why "text 1" of text, aside from what is it?
...you often need to use an object reference: 
set myText to object reference of text 1 of text from insertion point myIndex to insertion point -1 of myStory 
The above example gets around this by not assigning the text to a variable. 
Yeah. The next time something doesn't work, I'm going to add "object reference of". If that doesn't work, I'll add "of parent story".
re: PageMaker scripting 
Let's be honest: It was awful. I loved it, because it was better than nothing, but it was fragile and incredibly limited.
I think maybe I just used it different than other people, to get simple things I could trigger easily (using QuicKeys) rather than doing more complex things of the type you found it inadequate for. I believe you, really.
CS2 doesn't have GREP, so charles darwin can't use that.
I think he'll have to evolve, then.
CS4 has GREP nested styles. You'll dig them.
You said it, daddy-o. I'll check out the scene.
While I'm the first to admit that the InDesign scripting documentation is not perfect, I have to point out--as gently as I can--that many of the problems you're having have to do with your knowledge of AppleScript, not InDesign scripting per se. 
Or my bad memory, or my denseness. I read the Danny Goodman AppleScript book, Tom Trinko's (gigantic)
Applied Mac Scripting,
The Tao of AppleScript,
Leer Jezelf Makkelijk AppleScript (in Dutch), Apple and Adobe PDFs, and I don't know what. But I never used most of what I read, and so forgot it.
The FindText.applescript tutorial script goes over the basics of finding text in InDesign, and FindChangeText.applescript shows how to change text. While they can't cover every possible combination of find/change attributes, I think they do their job. Let me know if that's not the case! 
I only looked at what was in the Scripting Guide, which did seem inadequate for some of the things I wanted to do in the scripts I recently did. If there was more in the samples, then I should have paid attention to them. If I have a look and find something missing there too, I will let you know.
re: tool selection 
InDesign scripting doesn't really deal with user interface interactions--it's not really designed that way. In PageMaker scripting, you *had* to select tools, because the script was running the user interface. In InDesign, scripts don't do anything with the user interface--they work on the object model directly. 
Okay, but I haven't wanted or needed to script a tool change myself. Like I said, I did it in PageMaker basically only because that was the only way to do it with keycodes.
This means that a script won't fail if/when the window view changes, when the selection state isn't what you expect, etc. (all of the things that made PageMaker scripting so fragile). 
Aha, now we understand your e e cummings paranoia. :-)
If you'd like, we could take a shot at converting some of your PageMaker scripts to InDesign as test cases--I still remember enough of PageMaker scripti[ng] that I should be able to translate. 
That's very kind of you, thanks, but I think my problem will be finding the time to go through so many of them rather than figuring out the conversions. I'll post a problem if/when I hit one, but... are you perhaps in applescript-users? This forum is great, but I think I can have enough scripting without running into so much JavaScript all the time.
Thanks,
Roy