Searching through multiple InDesign files

I use InDesign via Windows. In Windows I can search for key words through documents and folders via My Documents/Explorer. Is there a way to search through multiple InDesign files the same way?

I don't think there is.
If you use this indesign batch convert
And convert your InDesign files to RTF - they should be searchable when using the search function in windows.
Does that help?

Similar Messages

Performing a search within multiple .as files

In Flash CS4 is it possible to perform a search within
multiple .as files, or an entire project?
thanks!

I'm don't know if that's possible on CS4, but you can search
using the OS searching tools:
I'm not sure about Mac OS, but on Windows, you can click on
Start, Search, and under the Containing Text field, you can type in
'trace' (without quotes). Then click on the drop-down box under
'Look In:' and select Browse...
Browse to the location of your project and select it, then
click the Search Now button to begin searching through the files
there.
It will at least tell you which file(s) have trace in them.
Once you know that, then you can search through the file using CS4
to find the actual command. It would be much more convenient to
have that as a feature in CS4, but I don't know if it is.

Multiple indesign files for product brochure one data merge file

I have multiple indesign files for product brochure and there are price changes for various products.
attached is a screen shot of the folder where all the indesign files are located as you can see each one has been laid out as a spread.
Rather than opening each individual indesign file to amend prices can i quickly? or is there a way of compliling all documents into one file and quickly updating the price with the data merge file.
thanks in advance.

Absolutely not.
(1)     PDF/VT-1 files must also be PDF/X-4 files. The “create PDF via distillation of PostScript” method precludes this since PostScript supports neither live transparency nor color management.
(2)     The efficiencies of PDF/VT-1 require use of Forms XOjects and Image XObjects in the PDF file. That requires direct PDF creation that you get from PDF export. This is not available via any route that uses stink'in PostScript as an intermediary.
(3)     Adobe most strongly endorses PDF creation from InDesign via the export function, not printing to PostScript and distilling. Such PostScript is optimized strictly for printing and not for PDF file creation.
          - Dov

Batch export text from multiple Indesign files, applying em and strong tags

Hi there,
I am struggling for a while now with the following workflow:
batch exporting all text (text only) as plain text, from multiple Indesign files, applying and for all the bold and italics (for instance: Molluptas verion nossum idist doluptatet maiorerum quiaspienit, cum erferiosapis eos expe nonsequas verumquae dolor sim eos doluptatiur autet lab idicili beatum deliquat).
Properly tagging the styles, will be too time consuming, as these documents are as old as 1998, have inconsistent untagged styles; it will mean to manually open up each file, assign tags for all styles (not to mention that might be some local overwrites).
This task is necessary to have all the archive, available on wordpress website.
Any feedback would be much appreciated it.
Thanks.

There may well be a script or you may have pay someone to write it. All I can tell you is that any text not mapped to a style will be a mess in the HTML code.
Can’t comment on Quark files. I have no clue what they’re capable of.
Bob

Joining multiple inDesign files into one, can you solve this?

OK so basically I work at a magazine, the creative's all work on separate spreads so all the inDesign files consist of between 1 and 10 pages then usually they are all spat out in there sets of PDF's and sent to the printers.
Now I want to do an online addition of the magazine with the new SWF export feature in inDesign CS4 but I'm wondering how can you easily compile all of the separate inDesign files into one so that it can spit out one single swf with all 200 pages with the page peel effect?
Is there even a way without a mass of work of manually adding all the pages into one file, that would be absolutely humongous? Anyone with any suggestions how to make this process the simplist and with the least amount of labout would be an absoulute legend, I have little time to spend on this which sucks so looking for the best and fastest possible way that we could do it each month.
Cheers
J

I migth have a kind of solution for you. I have made a solution named eDocBrowser. (I called it Magazine Browser in earlier threads here and couple of other forums). It´s a collection of files that you publish with you SWF-files you have exported from InDesign. With eDocBrowser, you can put several SWF-files together and end-user can use them almost as one single SWF. Heres little demo I made just few minutes ago.
http://www.prepress.fi/eDocBrowser/
There are 3 SWF-files, all of them exported from InDesign. They are originally separate indd-files. When you reach last page of Document1, small arrow appears, and text "Jump to next file" and name of the next file too. You can go there also by using next-button at the bottom right corner, one that you use normaly to go next page. Same kind of arrow appears also when you are in first page of document 2 or 3 etc... with it you can go back to earlier documents last page etc... All the documents can be seen also in a drop-down menu at top of the screen. Labels of that menu are customizable.
Theres also a zoom. When you clic zoom+ button, your cursor changes to magnifying glass. With zoom- you can go back to normal view.
Additional features are FullScreen-view, Printing current spread and customizing user interface, buttons and logo at the top-left corner. Text search is very exprerimental and requires indd-file indexing with script we have made too. It indexes every single word in indd-document to XML-file and put pagenumbers there too. eDocBrowser searches that XML-file and gives all the hits to small result window. Hits are also links to page where they point...Search is not in use with this demo..
There is a small help-section in top-right corner...
We also have a script called eDocMaker. It does everything for you. You just have to have indd-files in one folder. Script asks location of that folder when you run it. It also askes you which resolution you want to use with images, anything goes between 72-2400 (72ppi is indesign´s default resolution for SWF-export, using bigger resolution might cause bigger SWF-files, but images look better when zoomed)
Price of the single licence of eDocBrowser will be 80euros (aprx. 100dollars). With it you may install one copy of eDocBrowser into your server and use as many SWF-files there as you want. There is no search feature in single version.
Price of unlimited licence is 300euros (aprx.400dollars) With it you may install as many copies of eDocBrowser as you like. With it you also get all the indesign scripts including eDocMaker with resolution booster, search indexer etc. + goodies like user interface and button templates, indesign effect (3D spine graphic etc)....
Product is about ready, we are just setting up a place to sell it. Now it seems that we are going to use a service called payloadz.com....
Additional info: petteri.paananen[at]NOSPAMprepress.fi (replace [at] with @ and remove NOSPAM)

Index - How to create an index for multiple InDesign files?

Hi everyone,
I'm using InDesign CS2 to create a 250 page catalogue. Most of it is finished now, and I've come to creating the index.
The catalogue is spread over about 10 InDesign files. How do I create an index for this? No paragraph styles were set up when it was started, but there are character styles.
I've done some searching - does it need to be booked so I Can index? And can I book it without paragraph styles?
(I've only been using InDesign for about a year, mostly self taught.)
Thanks in advance :)
Naomi

Creating a book from your files should be no problem at all. ID does
i not
synchronize styles across documents -- unless you order it to! (That's what the checkboxes at the left of the book documents are for. Do Not Use, in your case.)
The Index function itself is book-savvy, but you might want to search this forum for a few recurring problems.

How can I create multiple PDF files from multiple InDesign files?

I have 144 InDesign files that I need to create a PDF file for each. I do not want to open each InDesign file to create the PDF's. Acrobat Batch create won't open the InDesign files. Is there another way?

Only InDesign can do this. You may want to look at InDesign automation.

How to flip through multiple image files in a folder using Preview?

On windows a default image viewing program similar to preview allows a user to press the arrow keys to flip through images within the same folder as the image file originally opened with a Preview-like application.
How can a person filp through images in the same folder with a few keystrokes using Preview?
thanks

hmm...you mean there isn't a way to simply skim
through images in a folder using an arrow or page-up
key?? That's kind of disappointing...especially
being forced to pre-select images...
oceanbluesky,
There's no reason you can't use Preview to do what you're trying to do. And there's no need to pre-select images.
The trick is to open Preview first, and then choose Open from the File menu (or Command + O on the keyboard). When Preview's Open dialog window appears, navigate to the folder which contains your pictures. Highlight the entire folder and then press the Open button. Once the folder is open in Preview you should be able to use your arrow keys to flip through...
Note: To avoid a storm of images from opening on your desktop, go to Preview > Preferences > Images and make sure that the "Open each image in its own window" radio button is not selected.
Good luck!
Andrew99
iMac 1 GHz Flat Panel 15" PPC 768 MB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Using 1 incopy file in multiple indesign files

Alright, here’s my situation.
At my company we provide e-learning for the medical industry. As marketing products we use printed brochures, flyers and give-away course overviews.
These products all have simular information except for some small details.
For example…
Brochures have:
- course category
- course title
- course author
- course register icons
Flyers have:
- course category
- course title
- course author
Give-away course overviews have (see image below):
- course category
- course title
- course author
- course register icons
- course points
The register icons are small shapes and these shapes together with the points (ptn) and authors are placed in a table to align them.
I'm now using 1 Incopy file for all these products in a not very ideal way.
The way I use incopy is the following:
create/update the incopy file with all details
update linked files in indesign
detach linked files and remove unneeded details for each specific product
export
Because the usages of tables step 3 is a lot of work for me.
We want to hand over the updating of the incopy files to our editors, but for our editors the tables and shapes aren’t easy to create in incopy.
Now I was thinking of linking all paragraphs in separate text-containers and place the unwanted details outside the visible area in indesign, but this is a pain to do aswell.
I would like to know what other techniques I can use.
Is there a way to specify what paragraph from incopy I want to use in my indesign document?
Thanks in advance!

Tables ain't the problem. It's the shapes inside the tables. These shapes are the register symbols. There are about 20 unique icons. Now that I am going to use conditional text they just have to copy paste them. I'm going to make 3 different tables inside one InCopy file with the 3 different table-layouts and show/hide them with conditions:
Thanks for all the help!

Using spotlight to search through stored media files

i have an xserve that will only be used to store media files such as .dv and .mxf. I add spotlight comments to the media files before storing them in the xserve, however, when i use spotlight to search the server it does not work. Is it because it is a security issue or do i have to turn spotlight on in the server?

Using Spotlight to search a server is something that's coming with Leopard. To avoid the TOS gestapo for slamming me for posting about future products, I will link to Apple's page for "Leopard Server sneak peek" that talks about this very fact:
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/spotlightserver.html
Your options right now for searching a server are to use Apple Remote Desktop, as Tiger does not include the ability to search machines across the network via Spotlight.

Manage multiple InDesign and pdf files

I'm looking for help managing multiple pdf files created from InDesign. I make several catalogs from multiple InDesign files. Each InDesign file could be used in multiple catalogs. These catalogs are output as pdf files. The pdf files are sent to print and also live on our website. I could update one InDesign file for a particular catalog. That same file could also be in another catalog that should be updated as well. The online version would need to be updated also. This doesn't always happen. There are so many things that have to be updated manually.
I know this is confusing and vague. I'm guessing there has to be a way to not have to do everything manually. There has to be a smarter way to do this.
I would appreciate any suggestions or even a push in the right direction for research.
Thanks!

You know you can place InDesign files directly into another InDesign file.
Then when you update the master indesign file you will be prompted to update your links in any other document that this appears in.

Searching for links across multiple pdf files

We have thousands of pdf files that are being moved to a new website. Some of these pdf files have links within them (either as text or as a hyperlink). This number is unknown.
The issue is how to programmatically search across multiple pdf files (numbering in the thousands) looking for links using a regular expression or part of a path. This will have to be able to search behind the text and search for the link url.
We first need to identify the number of files with links and create a list of the files with links that need modifying. If the number is too great to modify manually, then we would need the ability to programmatically edit these links.
The pdf files are stored in a database. Also, the pdf files are different versions and some are password protected.
Is there an Adobe product that will perform this? If not, are there any 3rd party vendor products that will accomplish this?
Thanks in advance for your help.

I have no solution, but a thought: the database factor may seem to be
a killer. But you could look for a solution designed to read PDF files
from a web site (by spidering or from a list), which would presumably
load them.
Or could do a one off extraction of the files from the database into a
directory and use that for your process. Probably a very good idea,
since extracting all files from the database is likely to be costly
and hammer the server (but can be scheduled at a sensible pace), while
the search process will (if it is possible at all) doubtless need to
be run countless times.
Aandi Inston

Searching through .fla files

Usually when I am looking for a specific field name, section of code or variable, I will run a GREP regex search to search through my ASP files, which works great as they are just stored as plain text, however I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to do the same with ".fla" files.
The GREP search looks through all my files in one go and returns a list of files which match the search terms; but wouldn't work on .fla files as the actionscript is not stored as plain text. Possibly this would work if I converted all my ".fla"s to use seperate ".as" files but this would be a lot of work and I'd rather avoid it if possible.
Thanks for any help you can give.

Select the stage window, then select Search and Replace from the Edit menu. This search tool works pretty well. If you search when an Actionscript window is selected you will only be able to search that one frame of AS.

AppleScript (or Automator?): How to search through online сhеss games?

Hello.
I would like to search for specific online сhеss games. Each game has a single adress. We are talking about millions of games. Obviously, it's far too long to index all the games. So I will set a limit and use the script at night. Conditions should be something like this:
For adress example.com/game=NumberA to example.com/game=NumberB
Search every web page containing SpecificWord
Store wanted web adresses somewhere (so I could see the games by myself during the day)
As you can see, I know nothing about Applescript and I don't know how to start, nor how the script can pick up adresses. I think it's possible and not difficult to code, just time consuming for the program to search through thousands of games.
Should I use AppleScript or Automator? Should the script open Safari (or Firefox if possible) or can it search without any browser? Is it possible to simultaneously search through multiple pages/adresses? Maybe I could write several scripts for different ranges of games? If so, how many pages can I open at once? For instance I could disable images in Firefox to load quicker. How much time does it need to search for one game? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 seconds?
Any easy tutorials, examples of similar codes, advices, hints or tips are appreciated.

Thanks for answering. Sorry that I was so unclear. My main problem was how to get urls and games id as variables. But then I thought there already should be programs doing web crawling. I have found Scrapy which use Python language.
(Maybe I should edit my question, add Scrapy and Python as tags instead of applescript and automator. Is it possible?)
I have Mac OS 10.6.8, Python 2.6.1. Scrapy needs at least Python 2.7 so I have downloaded the last version of Python (3.3). I think I can handle the programming in Scrapy thanks to their tutorial. The most difficult part should be... how to install Scrapy. Don't laugh at me.
I have entered "sudo easy_install Scrapy" in the terminal. But the terminal still uses Python 2.6.1. Python 3.3 is installed but I don't know how to clean update Python. If anyone knows, feel free...
When I write scrapy in the terminal, here is what I get:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/scrapy", line 4, in <module>
 import pkg_resources
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/pkg _resources.py", line 2556, in <module>
 working_set.require(__requires__)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/pkg _resources.py", line 620, in require
 needed = self.resolve(parse_requirements(requirements))
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/pkg _resources.py", line 518, in resolve
 raise DistributionNotFound(req) # XXX put more info here
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: lxml
It seems Scrapy also needs something called lxml. Right now I am trying to make Python 3.3 the default python version. Is there a web crawler GUI which already includes Python, Scrapy, lxml?
By default I also have Python 2.4 and 2.5. Does the system need them? I prefer not to delete system files but together all Python versions weigh 500 MB.
In regard to the real example URL: let's say instantchess.com. Here's a game URL: http://www.instantchess.com/?EXP=1&GPI=84094532
84094532 is the game id. Let's say I want to search every Reti openings (thus the page must contain the word "Reti") from id 84000000 to 85000000 and store games id in my computer. If I have understood correctly, I need to search through the source code of the pages.
Feel free to add any remarks, suggestions, ideas.

Automatically place images within multiple InDesign documents

I work for a publishing company of agricultural trade magazines and work on few titles each month. We are trying to streamline our production procedures and previous company I worked for had a script they used to place images within text pages by searching for the file name, however there were some limitations with this script (it would only work within 1 InDesign document and only within 1 InDesign story at a time). The company I am with now breaks out each editorial story into separate InDesign files and we place image boxes when the display ads are going to go. For our purposes now, I am looking for a script that, once all of the image boxes were tagged with the image file names, could search between multiple InDesign documents in a folder and automatically place all the images for us. Is anything like this available or able to be created? If so, would it have the capacity to search between multiple InDesign documents and search the entire document for the image file names? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Kasyan,
They were tagged using a program called Pathways created by a computer programmer the company used at the time. The issues that I was working on were annual Buyers' Guides so they were mainly just listings and inline graphics. The kinds of issues I work on now are monthly issue with various stories and no inline graphics, but display advertisements. And each story is created and laid out in a separate InDesign document. So I would need a script that can search an entire group of documents for file names and/or image boxes instead of just in one story in one document for inline graphics. (sorry if this is confusing).
I currently do not have a script to work from and am looking for something new that can be used to save use the time of placing every ad manually.
Thanks for your help and feedback!
Matt

Searching through multiple InDesign files

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