Have you ever wished for a script that would clean up myriads of small text errors? Things like extra spacebar spaces, hard returns, and tabs?
Have you ever wished you had a script that corrected for em and en dashes, proper quote marks, and apostrophes? Maybe a bit of phone number format regularity as well? You might like to try Mike's FindChangeByListPLUS2025.jsx, an improvement on InDesign's pre-installed script.
Here is what this script accomplishes on your tagged or untagged text:
1. Find all multiple spaces and replace with single spaces.
2. Find all spaces preceded by a return and remove the space. Now improved to protect paragraph styles.
3. Find all spaces followed by a return and remove the space. Now improved to protect paragraph styles.
4. Find all double TAB characters and replace with single TAB character.
5. Find a TAB character preceded by a return character and remove the tab character. Now improved to protect paragraph styles.
6. Find a tab character followed by a hard return character and remove the tab character. Now improved to protect paragraph styles.
7. Find all double returns and replace with single returns.
8. Find the last hard return at the end of story marker and delete the hard return.
9. Find all space-hyphen-space and replace with an EN dash. Improved to work with or without spaces present.
10. Find all hyphen-hyphen and replace with an EM dash without spaces. Improved to work with or without spaces present.
As an improvement on the original script, the above find/changes won't change any applied paragraph styles within your text.
Additional features added on in this improved PLUS version:
11. Force all 10-digit phone numbers to conform to 3-dot-3-dot-4 pattern.
12. Find all single hyphens (with or without spaces) between two numbers and replace with an EN dash.
13. Find all soft return line breaks and strip them out.
14. Find all single ditto marks (aka dumb quotes) within contraction words and replace with apostrophes.
15. Find all single ditto marks and replace with single opening quotes.
16. Find all single ditto marks and replace with single closing quotes.
17. Find all double ditto marks and replace with double quote marks.
18. Find all single left quote marks to the left of double digits and replace with apostrophes.
19. Find all discretionary hyphens and strip them out.
20. Find three period stops and replace with a single ellipsis character.
21. Find all doubled period stops and replace with a single period stop.
22. Find all manually made bullets and remove them (in favor of using a bulleted style).
23. Remove any final hard return at the end of the story text.
Improved since 2022/2023:
24. Find a leading spacebar space at the beginning of the story and strip it out.
25. Improve performance of correcting quote marks within text.
26. Find paragraphs set to No Language and change to English.
How to install this script into InDesign 2025 (and also earlier versions):
1. Unzip the FindChangeByListPLUS.zip file to reveal the javascript and a FindChangeSupportPLUS sub-folder. Unzipping on Mac involves simply double-clicking the zip file. On Windows, you unzip by right-clicking the zip file, and choosing Extract All. You might also have a zip/unzip utility like 7zip, also available at the right-click, if you previously downloaded and installed it.
2. Select both the script and the sub-folder and either drag or copy 'n' paste to this folder location:
macOS:
Users/Username/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version xx.x/en_US/Scripts Panel
Windows 10/11:
Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\Version xx.x\en_US\Scripts\Scripts Panel
If you are in an earlier or later version, you would substitute "Version 20.0" with whatever version number you are installing into.
3. Restart InDesign 2025 (or your earlier version) and open Window > Utility > Scripts. The resulting open panel will have your new script, FindChangeByListPLUS.jsx, ready to be double-clicked into action for cleaning up the many typing errors in your text.
Enjoy the quick cleanup power of the new and improved Mike's FindChangeByListPLUS2025.jsx!
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