🚀 go-pugleaf

John--

You know, there are probably as many ways to accomplish this as there are scripters. Iolaire's approach--processing the text outside InDesign--is a good one (though I think using InDesing tagged text might be a bit better than RTF).

But let's assume that you want to do this inside InDesign. One reasonable approach would be to use the search method to populate one list with each place you found "[BOLD]" and then populate another with the corresponding list of "[UNBOLD]" items. Since the item at a given index in each list will match a corresponding item in the other list, and since each is a reference to an InDesign text object (and therefore carries with it information about its location in the story, you can do something like this (this assumes you have a character style named "bold" defined):



tell application "InDesign 2.0.2" 
set find preferences to nothing 
set change preferences to nothing 
tell active document 
set myCharacterStyle to character style "bold" 
set myStartItems to search for "[BOLD]" 
set myEndItems to search for "[UNBOLD]" 
if (count myStartItems) is not equal to (count myEndItems) then 
display dialog "Oops. The text must include mismatched formatting. Good luck finding the offending tags!" 
else 
repeat with myCounter from 1 to (count myStartItems) 
set myStartItem to item myCounter of myStartItems 
set myStory to object reference of parent story of myStartItem 
set myEndItem to item myCounter of myEndItems 
set myStartIndex to (index of character -1 of myStartItem) + 1 
set myEndIndex to (index of character 1 of myEndItem) - 1 
set applied character style of characters myStartIndex through myEndIndex of myStory to myCharacterStyle 
end repeat 
end if 
end tell 
end tell 




Thanks,

Ole