Indesig - character count export as metadata

[Uros_360ECM]

Hi,

I'm working at a company which business is Enterprise Content Management. One of our clients is a publishing company and they are using InDesign as their publishing software.

Now they've decided for a Document Management System to optimize the document management. We would like to somehow integrate InDesign and the DMS. Here is the case:

The payments to the authors are made based on number of characters in the article. We need to count the characters for each article and somehow use the Article ID and character number as metadata, which we will then import into DMS. Has anyone any experience on how to do that?

Kind regards, Uros

[rob day]

Metadata content can be scripted. Startup scripts can be triggered at open, close, or save, so it would be easy to insert the character count into the document metadata via a script

[rob day · Accepted solution]

Here's an example using AppleScript (OSX only). You would put a copy of this in your startup scripts folder (/Applications/Adobe InDesign CC 2014/Scripts/startup scripts) and the document name and character count would be inserted in the file info every time the file is saved. If you are not using OSX ask over in the scripting forum for a JS translation

tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2014"

    make event listener with properties {event type:"afterSave", handler:updateAll}

end tell

on updateAll()

    tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2014"

        tell active document

            set m to "Document Character Count= " & (count of every character of every story)

            set properties of metadata preferences to {document title:name, description:m}

        end tell

    end tell

end updateAll

[Uros_360ECM]

Thank you, Rob