CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptadobe-indesign
nkp07
nkp07

Reputation: 1

Different ways of counting characters in Indesign using javascript

I'm writing a javascript program to handle each character intо Indesign document.

To begin with, I wrote two different ways of counting characters, which for some reason give different results for large documents. Why?

            var  
            myDocument,  docStories,  docCharacters,
            docFootnotesCharacters,  docTablesCharacters; 

            myDocument = app.activeDocument;

            var TotalChars = 0;

            // Fisrt way
            docStories = myDocument.stories.everyItem();
            docCharacters = docStories.characters.length;  
            docFootnotesCharacters = docStories.footnotes.everyItem().characters.length;  
            docTablesCharacters = docStories.tables.everyItem().cells.everyItem().characters.length;  

             statReport = []; 

        // Second way     
        for ( j = 0; j < myDocument.stories.length; j++ ) {
            myStory = myDocument.stories.item(j);
            var Frames = myStory.textContainers;
            for ( i = 0; i < Frames.length; i++ ) {

                var Frame = Frames[i];
                for (var TextCnt = 0; TextCnt < Frame.texts.length; TextCnt++) {
                    CurrentText = Frame.texts.item(TextCnt);
                    TotalChars += CurrentText.characters.length;
                }
                for (var TableCnt = 0; TableCnt < Frame.tables.length; TableCnt++) {
                    var CurrentTable = Frame.tables.item(0);
                    for ( var CellCnt = 0; CellCnt < CurrentTable.cells.length; CellCnt++ ) {
                        var CurrentCell = CurrentTable.cells.item(CellCnt);
                        TotalChars += CurrentCell.characters.length;
                    }
                }
                for (var FootNoteCnt = 0; FootNoteCnt < Frame.footnotes.length; FootNoteCnt++) {
                    var CurrentFootNote = Frame.footnotes.item(0);
                    TotalChars += CurrentFootNote.characters.length; 
                }
            }
        }
        statReport.push ( "Characters: " + ( docCharacters + docFootnotesCharacters + docTablesCharacters ) ); 
        statReport.push ( "TotalChars: " + TotalChars ); 
        alert ( statReport.join ( "\r" ), "Document Text Statistic" );

Upvotes: 0

Views: 294

Answers (1)

Ariel
Ariel

Reputation: 119

In the second method, you're counting all the characters inside text frames in the story. But stories can be overset (the text overflows). The first method will count overset text (because you're counting the characters in a story, but the second method will ignore those, because it's only counting characters in story frames.

Upvotes: 2

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