From the course: InDesign Secrets
174 How to sort text in InDesign - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
174 How to sort text in InDesign
- I need to alphabetize this list, and did you know that InDesign can do that for you? But you can look high and low in InDesign's menus and you'll never find the feature. Instead, you have to run a script that comes with InDesign. It's free, it ships with InDesign, but most InDesign users have no idea it's there. You can find it by heading up to the Window menu, choosing the Utilities submenu, and then choosing Scripts. Inside the Scripts panel, you want to open the Application folder, and then the Samples folder, and then, the JavaScript folder. And there's all kinds of cool scripts in here. I'm going to scroll down to near the bottom, and here I see the sort paragraph script. That's the script that's going to let me alphabetize this text. But before I run it, I have to select the text that I want to alphabetize. So, I'll double-click over here to switch to the Type tool, and then select all the text I want to alphabetize. Now, I'm going to run the script by double-clicking on it in the Scripts panel. I have two choices inside this Sort Method pop-up menu here, I can choose Ignore Formatting or Retain Formatting. Formatting has to do with the text formatting that I've placed on top of the text. For example, if any of this text had italic or bold text, I would need to choose Retain Formatting. But because there's no local formatting here, I can just leave it set to Ignore. Then, when I click OK, in an instant, InDesign goes through and alphabetizes the whole list. Now there are two weird things about this script that I want to let you know about. One is, if you want to undo this, you sometimes have to undo two or three times to get it back to the way it was. For example, I'll hit Cmd+z or Ctrl+z on Windows once and nothing happens. Then I'll press again, and then it goes back to the way it was. The second thing has to do with that Retain Formatting feature that I pointed out. Let's go ahead and select some text and I'll make it italic, for example. Now I want to run this script again, but I want to be very careful about what I select. When you have formatting and you know that you're going to be using that Retain Formatting feature, you want to make sure you only select the text you want formatted, not any additional empty lines. See how down at the bottom, there's an empty paragraph? I don't want that. I'm going to move my cursor up to just the text inside that paragraph. For some reason, if there's formatting and empty paragraphs, the script kind of freaks out and you get a warning. But now, with just that text selected, I'll run the script one more time by double-clicking on it, I'll choose Retain Formatting slower, and then click OK. Sort paragraphs is a great script, and it can save you so much time. There's a bunch of other scripts in here, too you should try. Just start double-clicking on these and see what they do.
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Contents
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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