🚀 go-pugleaf

Jay-- 

No, you're doing fine! Keep on asking! 

peter wrote: "I don't know the original reason for this, but I find it quite confusing. Why should text be the one exception?" 

I feel the same way, and very strongly agree (you'll find a number of rants from me on this topic in the forum archives<g>). 

Anyway, it's okay, you're not the only one struggling with text references in AppleScript (it's not a problem if you're scripting InDesign in Windows). 

The next thing you'll probably run into--when you define a text object reference variable in AppleScript, it's stored as "text from character x to character y of story z". This means that a reference to a paragraph, for example, will go out of date if you add or delete characters before that paragraph. By "out of date," I mean that the object reference no longer points to the same piece of text, and might even point to text that is no longer in your document (whcih will cause a script execution error). (In Windows scripting, this isn't the case--a reference to paragraph 3 remains valid unless you add/delete entire paragraphs before the object.) 

On either platform, we've learned to iterate backwards through the text objects in stories to keep our text object references from becoming invalid--something like: 

tell story 1 of document 1 
repeat with myCounter from (count paragraphs) to 1 by -1 
set myParagraph to object reference of paragraph myCounter 
--do something with the paragraph 
end repeat 
end tell 
 

Thanks, 

Ole