🚀 go-pugleaf

We currently have a script that will do the following. However, we need it to go a bit further as noted below. I'm afraid we'll need to include some of InDesign's API in the mix. I need to know if the next generation of InDesign will add this feature before I can acquire the resources to build this script.

Current script:
Recognizes character entities within imported XML and directly maps them to character styles. eg. italic, bold, bold/ital/underline, smallcap, etc. (works nice)

The need for this additional scripting comes up as a result of the following:
Character styles are set up as variations of our Body A style. Character entities tagged for character styles other than Body A will get the same character style attributes as Body A. This presents a problem. For example, while the italic character style may have a font face attribute of "italic," the font for a heading style may have an italic face named "oblique." Or, a "bold" face for a heading may be called "Heavy," etc.
As the current script applies character styles, InDesign remains indecisive of what font to apply to these tagged, non-Body A styles with different face names. It then marks the text with a default font and background highlight. The layout person then needs to find all the marked areas and make corrections, This is counter-productive.

I'm proposing a new script which will allow us to do the following:
* select an XML-based paragraph style (these would be entities based on existing paragraph styles);
* select any XML tag/character entity that would be mapped to a character style (based on the XML tags available and the tag mapping for that document);
* make provisions to alter the base character style (while keeping this alteration independent of the original); and allow one to
* select font and font face attributes from a character pallet-type interface (introduction of API); and then
* apply these changes as one goes along with the layout or after the initial placement.
* It would either, need to be able to work on selected parts of the XML (stories), or be able to function multiple times as text is added without disrupting previously placed text.
* This script would function to directly effect only the selected character entity tags for a given paragraph style.

It seems like a mouth-full. I do believe however, that it can be done.

Please give me any indication if this is coming our way or if I'll need to build it. My resources are sparse and it will take several months to accomplish this.

Thanks
Tom