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Ivan O\'Brien
Ivan O\'Brien
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How to automatically make twitter @name fields into hyperlinks in Indesign?

Aug 30, 2011 9:11 AM

Hi folks,

   I have a book of tweets coming out and would like to publish Kindle, ePub and PDF versions of it, which would need hyperlinks throughout to work at all. So what I need is a way to automatically convert

@Me

into

<A HREF="http://www.twitter.com/Me">@Me</A>

as it were.

There are about 1000 of them, so I don't want to have to do it manually!

I have already used a GREP style to automatically format the @text (it's always one word, so it's easy) but the automatic hyperlink tool does not seem to allow customisation of what hyperlinks look like.

Does anybody have any ideas as to the best way to approach this?

 

Thanks,

 

Ivan

773 Views   8 Replies   Latest reply: cdmazoff, Feb 22, 2013 4:20 PM
 
Replies
  • Steve Werner
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    1. Steve Werner,
    Aug 30, 2011 10:00 AM   in reply to Ivan O\'Brien
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    Scripting.

     

    You might ask on the InDesign Scripting forum for someone to brew a quick script.

     
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  • John Hawkinson
    5,527 posts
    Jun 25, 2009
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    2. John Hawkinson,
    Aug 30, 2011 10:15 AM   in reply to Ivan O\'Brien
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    I would search-and-replace them all changing @Me into http://twitter.com/Me (or whatever), then autohyperlink them, and then search-and-replace them back to @Me.

     

    You could also do this in an external text editor by exporting the stor(ies) to InDesign Tagged Text and setting up the hyperlinks there.

     
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  • Ivan O\'Brien
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    3. Ivan O\'Brien,
    Aug 31, 2011 9:15 AM   in reply to John Hawkinson
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    That worked, thanks, John: easy and obvious can win the day ...

    It did show up some interesting assumptions that the automatic hyperlink generator uses -- any word with a "." in the middle of it is a URL, so there were quite a lot of concatonated phrases that got picked out for special attention, though these were easily dealt with.

     

    Thanks,

     

    Ivan

     
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  • cdmazoff
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    4. cdmazoff,
    Feb 21, 2013 4:32 PM   in reply to Ivan O\'Brien
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    I'm having a real problem putting a retweet into a document and then having the link work when I pdf it.  Can anyone please contact me and give us a hand.. It may not be complicated for you but it's knocking me out..

     
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  • John Hawkinson
    5,527 posts
    Jun 25, 2009
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    5. John Hawkinson,
    Feb 21, 2013 10:58 PM   in reply to cdmazoff
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    Well, please ask a more specific question.

    What's your goal, what are you trying, and how is it failing? Please include a screenshot.

     
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  • cdmazoff
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    6. cdmazoff,
    Feb 22, 2013 10:27 AM   in reply to John Hawkinson
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    Wow.. that was quick John!!!  Thank you.  But I spend many many hours yesterday going round in circles and finally figured out how to do what I wanted which was to embed a retweet in a pdf.. The finished product is now at.. http://www.hcvadvocate.org/community/community_pdf/Las%20Vegas,%20NV%2 0%20March%205,%202013.pdf .. Thanks!!

     
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  • John Hawkinson
    5,527 posts
    Jun 25, 2009
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    7. John Hawkinson,
    Feb 22, 2013 3:16 PM   in reply to cdmazoff
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    cdmazoff: OK, glad you solved your problem. But once you post here that you're having a problem, it would be good for you to post explaining the problem and what your solution was, so that others having the same problem can benefit from your efforts. So when you have a moment, please post the details! Thanks.

     
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  • cdmazoff
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    8. cdmazoff,
    Feb 22, 2013 4:20 PM   in reply to John Hawkinson
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    Hello John... Thanks.. My problem in large part stems from the way InDesign handles hyperlinks and what happens during the pdf process.. I have been having real problems with the "shared" destination default etc.. Anyways:  then I had to put in a twitter link and I couldn't find any clear description of how to do this in InDesign or the help community. I went around in circles.. The problem was with html tags.. and twitter exceptions and etc.. Anyways: the whole thing worked out after I spent many hours on the net.. mostly trying to find the right language to use to phrase the problem..  Not being a "tweeter" complicated issues.. (I had to do this for those who do tweet)... The answer, in short was this:

    1. get a retweet button;
    2. put retweet button in InDesign doc. 
    3. Post a tweet (in this case it was "Save the Date: HCV Training March 26, Houston TX  [link to permanent pdf of the training flyer]..
    4. Twitter will generate a short url.
    5. In Twitter, hover mouse over post and then "More" pops up
    6. Click on Embed
    7. Copy Embed code
    8. Paste embed code to text file
    9. Make URL hyperlink for retweet button and in the Destination put: http://twitter.com/share?text=Save%20The%20Date%20Houston%20March%2026 &url=http://t.co/AQVrqixC0O
    10. Note: The above contains the message (after the text=) which must use %20 in lieu of any spaces in the text description.  Then after the &url= paste the short url that you copied from the embed code.
    11. Make sure that the InDesign link is NOT a shared destination and that it is a URL
    12. Save file and export to PDF

     

    As you can see... this took a while to figger out.. I found several posts on the internet but none stood alone... So here you go.

     
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