I found another way to speed up our book design work.
My wife has had a routine for years of creating linked text frames out on the paste board of an inDesign document, into which she places the Miscrosoft Word manuscript document she gets from the author. She cuts and pastes sections of the text into the text frames of the book. As she completes the inDesign pages, she deletes the pasteboard text frame which shifts the remaining text down to the next page.
I wrote an Applescript which automated this process. I put it in the Scripts folder so she can launch it from the Scripts palette window.
She’s used it now numerous times to do her work, and today I asked her how we could expand it to do more. She told me that manuscript files often have a lot of page breaks which she always deletes, as her pages always break differently. So I decided to add code to do that for her.
I made a test Word file to which I added page breaks, and then I googled “applescript remove Word page breaks” and found some code which does that. I learned that the MS code for a page break is “^12”. So I scripted Word to find and replace those codes with “”. Worked like a champ.
I added those lines to my inDesign script, replacing “choose file” with “set contents. . .” of my first inDesign text frame to the contents of the active Word manuscript file, sans page breaks.
Again, worked like a champ. I’m very pleased that I can automate our production processes with LateNight, Adobe, and Apple software tools.