Re: Still need help with InDesign hyperlinks

["Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Sarah,
It *may* be possible to work around this annoyance using scripting, but I
regret I don't have InDesign installed on my system, so can't try out the
other side of this approach. I would personally rather invest a couple of
days to *learn* how to work with scripting rather than do hundreds or
thousands of hyperlinks all over again, by hand :-/ - after Doxygen produced
them automatically! And to have to do them all over again for the next
version of the software... [shudder]

Overview:
1. Import the RTF into a Word doc.
2. Use a Word macro to extract the URL of the hyperlink and dump it as text,
right beside the hyperlink itself.
3. Write an InDesign VBScript script which searches through your
imported-from-Word document for these extracted URLs, then cuts them out of
the text, selects the word or words before the URL, and creates a Hyperlink
out of that, using the URL text which was just cut to the clipboard.

The Word side of it is pretty simple; you could use a small macro like this
on, which I threw together in a couple of minutes:

Sub ExtractHLinks()
   Dim hlLoop As Hyperlink
   Dim strTemp As String

   For Each hlLoop In ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks
       strTemp = hlLoop.Address
       hlLoop.Range.Select
       Selection.Collapse WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseEnd
       Selection.TypeText " ( " & strTemp & " )"
   Next
End Sub

The above, given text like this ("Google" and "Yahoo" are actually
hyperlinks to the respective sites, not evident in my text-only mail):

This is filler text. Hyperlink to Google. More filler text. Hyperlink to
Yahoo. And some filler text to cap it off.

changes it to:

This is filler text. Hyperlink to Google ( http://www.google.com/ ). More
filler text. Hyperlink to Yahoo ( http://www.yahoo.com/ ). And some filler
text to cap it off.

InDesign also has a VBScript engine, but as I said, I don't have a copy - so
I can't research the receiving end, where you automate the conversion back
into a Hyperlink object. In fact, I don't know if it's possible or if Adobe
have blocked that hole as well - but given that they seem to have a Bookmark
object and some HyperlinkDestination object (among others), I would hazard a
guess that it's doable.

Maybe you or some kind person on this list could look at the Scripting
Reference PDF on the IDCS2 CD-ROM, and try out (perhaps just on the sample
text above), whether you can :
1. Search for text starting with "http://"; (assuming ALL your URLs start
with that) and ending with a space
2. Select the "found" text.
3. Cut it to clipboard or assign it to a string variable and delete the URL
text.
4. Collapse the selection backward, then select a word to the left.
5. Make whatever call is necessary to convert the selected text to a
hyperlink, using the copied URL text as the destination.

I'm sorry I've used Word-relevant concepts of a selection, collapsing it
etc., but I have no idea of what it's like under IDCS2's scripting hood.
Sorry.

Regards,
Ed.

On 9/22/06, siliconwriter -at- comcast -dot- net <siliconwriter -at- comcast -dot- net> wrote: