Choosing from list... how to arrange the items in that list?

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hello Hello

A curious thing that I have:

I’m instructing QuarkXpress to allow me to choose from the list of stylesheets:

	set the_SSs to name of every style spec
	set theBaseStyle to choose from list the_SSs with prompt "Pick your stylesheet:" ¬
              OK button name {"Choose"} cancel button name {"No I won't"} without multiple selections allowed

And it works, but the list of stylesheets are not listed in alphabetical order.
I’m not sure what order they are in, but its not an order that I recognize. Maybe creation date?

Is there a way to get a list’s items to be presented alphabetically? (I’m surprised that this isn’t the default)

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#2 


        set the_SSs to name of every style spec
(*
Here insert a piece of code sorting your list according to your preferences
*)
        set theBaseStyle to choose from list the_SSs with prompt "Pick your stylesheet:" ¬
                  OK button name {"Choose"} cancel button name {"No I won't"} without multiple selections allowed

It’s not Choose from list duty to sort your list.
I would shout if it was doing that on a list carefully designed to fit my needs.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 8 décembre 2011 15:25:33

#3

I have just done a quick Google search and found this on http://hints.macworld.com/:

tell application "QuarkXPress"
	activate
	tell document 1
		set the_SSs to name of every style spec
		set the_list to the_SSs
		set old_delims to AppleScript's text item delimiters
		set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {ASCII character 10} -- always a linefeed
		set list_string to (the_list as string)
		set new_string to do shell script "echo " & quoted form of list_string & " | sort -f"
		set new_list to (paragraphs of new_string)
		set AppleScript's text item delimiters to old_delims
		set theBaseStyle to choose from list new_list with prompt ¬
			"Pick your stylesheet:" OK button name {"Choose"} cancel button name {"No I won't"} without multiple selections allowed
	end tell
end tell

Seems to work.

#4

The more I look at this, the more I think choosing from a list is the wrong way to go.

Would there be a way to, instead of having the user choose the stylesheet from a list,

…have them click in the QX document on a paragraph, and then that paragraph’s stylesheet would be the one the script uses?

I have this code, but it requires a selection of text:


tell application "QuarkXPress"
	activate
	tell document 1
		set sel to the selection
		tell paragraph 1 of sel
			set x to name of style sheet as text
			set the clipboard to x
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

Whereas I would just want to click on a paragraph and get its stylesheet

#5

Hi. I noticed in your first example that you refer to style spec and that you later use style sheet; if you use the latter syntax, is the result different? I don’t use XPress, but, if it allows keyboard assignment to scripts”à la InDesign”you could get the style sheet’s name value upon having a text selection and invoking the key command. If you need an arbitrarily ordered list, you could use the same method and append the results to a file.

#6

I believe (but don’t quote me) that “style spec” is a property of the document (the definition, or the attributes that it indicates) whereas the term style sheet is a property of a paragraph.