Create Outline for Arabic text in a Latin story

[Zaid Al Hilali]

I have a long book in Turkish that have Arabic words and sentences on most pages. I wanted to select all Arabic characters on all pages so I can outline them.

I used GREP in Find/Change, but I was only able to format all Arabic text within the document it doesn't show a selection highlight so I can choose "Create Outline" from the menu

[tpk1982]

HTH..

Re: found by grep character make outlines object

Thanks,

K

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Good day Karthik,

I looked at the linked page, It didn't make sense to me as I have little knowledge with scripts. Can you please elaborate on how to use those 11 lines, should I paste them into a text editor, and do I have to tweak any thing there before applying it on Arabic text?

[tpk1982]

HI Zaid,

Save this as .jsx extention

app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null;       
app.findGrepPreferences.findWhat = "\\S+"; 
app.findGrepPreferences.appliedFont = "ZapfDingbats BT";  // change the font name of yours
var found = app.activeDocument.findGrep(); 
app.findGrepPreferences = app.changeGrepPreferences = null; 
for(var i =0;i<found.length;i++) 
{ 
      var myObj = found.createOutlines(false); 
    } 

[tpk1982]

And change the font name whatever you need

[Laubender]

Hi Zaid,

what is the purpose of creating outlines?

1.

Perhaps the glyphs cannot be embedded with PDF Export or cannot be embedded properly?
And you want to make sure, that everything is readable as expected in exported PDFs?

Then I'd do the outlines with PDF export using a trick described here:

http://indesignsecrets.com/converting-text-to-outlines-the-right-way.php

2.

If not, expect some changes in composition of the surrounding text after outlining directly on the page.
Further, expect massive changes of composition after doing some edits in the text.

3.

If the purpose is to copy/paste glyph shapes: Convert to outlines without deleting the original text:
The UI is supporting this by holding the modifier key alt when converting text to outlines.

In scripting it's the boolean argument of the method createOutlines() that decides if original text is deleted.

Note: The result of the process is a shape or a group of shapes not anchored to the text.

So if you decide to use the method Karthik linked to and want duplicated shapes without removing the original text, use:

createOutlines(false)

instead of:

createOutlines()

Regards,
Uwe