Get Text with Applied Style

Question

Hi all,
I am using InDesign CS3 on OS 10.5. I'm trying to write something in Applescript that can look at a document and give me the text that has a certain applied style.
For example, if a document contained the text "Hello, world" and had an applied paragraph style called "Greeting," then what I want is to use my script to tell that document something like this:
tell application "Adobe Indesign CS3"
set theDoc to document 1
set theText to get every paragraph of theDoc whose applied paragraph style is "Greeting"
end tell
theText
-->should return: "Hello, world"
Obviously, I tried that script, but it doesn't work. I get the error "Adobe InDesign CS3 got an error: Cant get every paragraph of document "MyDocument.indd" whose applied paragraph style = "Greeting"."
I'm not sure if I am just using the wrong commands or what. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Hi Hayden,
The trouble is, theDoc doesn't have paragraphs. If you open the InDesign dictionary and look at the document object, you'll see text frames, and you'll see stories, but no paragraphs. To get all of the paragraphs, you'd use something like this:
set theText to every paragraph of every story
But getting every paragraph of every story whose applied paragraph style is a specific style is harder to do using a filter ("whose") clause, because it has multiple conditions. Shane can probably do it, but I'm not having much luck. All the same, why bother? InDesign has a perfectly good find text method that will do what you want. Something like this:
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS3"
--Clear the find text preferences
set find text preferences to nothing
set applied paragraph style of find text preferences to paragraph style "Greeting" of document 1
tell document 1
set myFoundItems to find text
end tell
end tell
Thanks,
Ole