🚀 go-pugleaf

Yes Laurent,

Thanks for the idea. Ole is right about copy and paste having serious limitations.

However the alternative is ridiculously cumbersome. There really should be an easy way to copy a range of pages or page items (with all attributes intact) from one place to another.

myDoc2.pages.item(x)=myDoc1.pages.item(x)

Took me a day, but I finally got a script working well enough to move 146 pages worth of text, tables, and graphics from one document to another.

The bummer is that I have to do this at all. The reason I needed this is because I've got lots of documents with power tables in them. The "plug-in-data" won't clean out. Every time we open a file that was created on a copy of ID that had this plug in, ID gives a warning. You can check a box that says "remove missing plug-in data" but if you do, the file gets corrupted and crashes InDesign. We're okay if we ignore it, but ID makes the file "untitled" when opening and I worry about the long-term health of these files. What we've been doing is copying and pasting all items into a new file to clean things up.

The script I wrote helps with this, but you've got to babysit while it runs. There are some odd things that wreck it. If I had the time I'd take Ole's suggestion and write something more bulletproof but I think all of our old documents will eventually be revised by the manual cut-and-paste method before I can get 'round to that.

Overall, scripting is great. But many tasks take longer to script than to do by traditional methods. I was lucky enough to have an intern for a year and a half who was a very good programmer. He taught me most of what I know on the subject. But now that I've got to do the programming myself, scripts take a lot longer to write and debug. But I'm getting smarter every day!

Ben