Digital Workshop

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but having never done this...


Is it possible to export all of the text from an Opus/Flex publication to a text file or other similar type of container without having to select and copy, cut and paste objects?

There are no dumb questions, just dumb answers ... and this might well be one of them

If there is a way to do what you want, I could never find it and had to resort to cut and paste.

That's a pain, but I could see it from DW's point of view. Imagine each pub having many pages, each with say six text objects per page. To produce an effective export might well require that the contents of each object would need to identified and kept isolated from the others.

My suggestion won't help you with your current need, but it might save some heartache with future pubs.

I tend to work almost exclusively with large text pubs, which sometimes have around 100,000 text objects in a pub. When I found that I couldn't export the text without having to resort to cut and paste, I reversed my working strategy.

With any major pub, I now create all my text in a word processor. This gives me a reference file(s) which has been useful when disaster strikes. It also allows me to do more controlled spell checking, grammar checking, case replacements, etc. than is available within Opus.

With Opus 281, I cut and pasted the contents from the WP files to Opus. With Opus 4.5 I save the WP files in RTF format and use the import text tool.

I'm sure others have found better ways to achieve similar results.

HTH

Thanks for the reply. That's sort of what I figured. I'm going to try a couple of other avenues, but then I probably will get down to some serious cut and pasting.

Hi,

Thank you for your enquiry.

You can save the contents of individual text object to a text file using the Save to File command. To do this, simply select the text object you wish to export and click Text > Save To File. You will now be prompted for the filename of the text file and the location to which you would like to save this file.

However, it is not currently possible to export multiple text objects in this way and you would have to repeat this for each text object in the publication.

Theoretically, you could export all pages of the publication to images (by selecting all of the pages in the publication and using File > Export Selected), then use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software such as ABBYY FineReader or OmniPage Pro to scan each image for legible text and export the results to a format of your choice. However, I can't say I have ever tried this and would recommend proof-reading the results carefully to ensure that the recognition settings were configured correctly.

Kind regards,