Inserting text before each italic

I’m wanting to add an “" before every time Italic is used in a story and another "” after the italic ends.

I thought this would be pretty easy, but I’m stumped. Any thoughts?

I see that this thread has (mysteriously) been tagged with “InDesign”, however, there is no mention of the application in the original question. Are we discussing ID stories?

Doh! :rolleyes: I didn’t paste all of my question.
Yes, I’m working with an InDesign CS3 story.

In my mind, the simplified workflow would be:

  1. looking for text style ranges that are italic
  2. then placing a “*” before and after those text ranges.

I’m guessing that this involves working with text style ranges, object references, and then insertion points (based on the found text ranges). I’m unclear on how all of these work together. I haven’t found an example in the Scripting Guide that makes it clear to me.

Thanks

I did a lot of trial and error, but was able to get this to work with a loop through the text style ranges:


		try
			set myTextStyleRanges to (count of text style ranges)
			repeat with i from 1 to (myTextStyleRanges) + 1
				if font style of text style range i is "Italic" then
					set ThisText to text of text style range i
					set text of text style range i to ("*" & ThisText & "*")
				end if
			end repeat
		end try

It’s short and works, but is there another (or better) way to do this?

Yes, that works too.
It’s a bit above my head, though. I see that it piggy backs InDesign’s Find/Change feature, but how it executes the Find/Change is greek to me.

I’ve always scripted a find/change within a story by setting every value in the Find/Change menu, then running

	tell parent story of item 1 of selection to change text

Could you explain how your solution works? :smiley:

Thank you