Bdtjtk

I'm writing a javascript program to handle each character intо Indesign document.

To begin with, I wrote two different ways of counting characters, which for some reason give different results for large documents. Why?

            var  

            myDocument,  docStories,  docCharacters,

            docFootnotesCharacters,  docTablesCharacters; 



            myDocument = app.activeDocument;



            var TotalChars = 0;



            // Fisrt way

            docStories = myDocument.stories.everyItem();

            docCharacters = docStories.characters.length;  

            docFootnotesCharacters = docStories.footnotes.everyItem().characters.length;  

            docTablesCharacters = docStories.tables.everyItem().cells.everyItem().characters.length;  



             statReport = ; 



        // Second way     

        for ( j = 0; j < myDocument.stories.length; j++ ) {

            myStory = myDocument.stories.item(j);

            var Frames = myStory.textContainers;

            for ( i = 0; i < Frames.length; i++ ) {



                var Frame = Frames[i];

                for (var TextCnt = 0; TextCnt < Frame.texts.length; TextCnt++) {

                    CurrentText = Frame.texts.item(TextCnt);

                    TotalChars += CurrentText.characters.length;

                }

                for (var TableCnt = 0; TableCnt < Frame.tables.length; TableCnt++) {

                    var CurrentTable = Frame.tables.item(0);

                    for ( var CellCnt = 0; CellCnt < CurrentTable.cells.length; CellCnt++ ) {

                        var CurrentCell = CurrentTable.cells.item(CellCnt);

                        TotalChars += CurrentCell.characters.length;

                    }

                }

                for (var FootNoteCnt = 0; FootNoteCnt < Frame.footnotes.length; FootNoteCnt++) {

                    var CurrentFootNote = Frame.footnotes.item(0);

                    TotalChars += CurrentFootNote.characters.length; 

                }

            }

        }

        statReport.push ( "Characters: " + ( docCharacters + docFootnotesCharacters + docTablesCharacters ) ); 

        statReport.push ( "TotalChars: " + TotalChars ); 

        alert ( statReport.join ( "r" ), "Document Text Statistic" );  

In the second method, you're counting all the characters inside text frames in the story. But stories can be overset (the text overflows). The first method will count overset text (because you're counting the characters in a story, but the second method will ignore those, because it's only counting characters in story frames.