Select by Region

[Tracy]

I have an Action that is not working, It seems I'm doing everything right
I'm wanting to move items .3 to the right on the odd pages and .3 to the left on the evens
I was trying to make separate actions for just to make it simple.
it's not doing anything. 
It's a small folio that is in the drill, a lot of pages.

actually not urgent now If I move those folios they will go into their text
this is now a customer problem but if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong, please!
Thanks!

[Tracy]

what I'm dealing with

[Joe]

How are you selecting the text you want moved?

[DCurry]

Select By Region can be tricky - the easiest way I've found is to draw a new box that encompasses the region you want, then when you are building the action if that box is selected you can use its location to define the region (little eyedropper to grab coordinates.) Then just delete the box after you build the action.

One thing that can burn you is you can choose whether the objects you are trying to select are either entirely within the region, or if they just touch the region. Sometimes lines of text might be longer than you think so make the region as large as you safely can.

[Tracy]

I tried selecting the text as everything is in the same spot
but I also tried drawing a box like Curry said but can you post a screen shot
of creating the box? I think this may be the problem.
Thanks Guys!

would a blank box cause a problem? like there is nothing there?

[Joe]

Drawing a box though would also grab the magenta circle unless there is an action option to only select text...which there may be. Kind of out of the loop on these things now.

[Tracy]

The magenta drill is in my indesign file, not on the file I was going to fix
just showing the issue.
I'm going to try selecting with a box again, I think I'm doing that wrong
no rush now 
Thanks Joe! always helping

[Tracy]

actually these folios are just for putting the job together
it has 4 different sheet sizes tabs right, tabs top, tabs bottom, round corner, drill
it is so complex. Just like our Government!
Oh and Half the book is Yelo and it flips so the front half of the book is white and you flip it over for the yelo part
who thinks up these things?

were going to drill through it after they are put together

[DCurry]

Can you give me the file to play with? I already have actions like this and could probavbly tweak one of them to work for your file. Even though you said it's going to push the type into the body copy, at least you'll have most of the action and can tweak it as needed.

You can select text within the region and ignore non-text. You can also select the text by font, point size, etc which might not be necessary in this case, but can be helpful sometimes.

Adding a box - it's under Pitstop Edit tools - called Add rectangle. Location of Pitstop Edit varies by version and preferences.

[Tracy]

I didn't know you can select by font size, well I think I forgot! 
I can PM you a page without any sensitive info, there is a disclaimer on this document not to share with any other countries etc... must be destroyed ya da ya da ya da

[DCurry]

Got it! I might have time today to mess with it. More fun than anything else I should be doing.

[DCurry]

Here are the 2 actions. I didn't go crazy selecting by type or anything like that because I couldn't find one I already had that combined that with select by region and just using region did the job.

(I did not delete your Dropbox PDF - I'm not logged in and just downloaded it as a guest, so you should delete it on your end I think.)

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dqgabcr9ckawg3c59xn7p/B4_moveActions.zip?rlkey=nqatu6acae8q2wr3ivr6h84f6&dl=0

[DCurry]

BTW, I'm on Pitstop 13. Sometimes newer versions have trouble with older actions. If that happens I'll take screenshots of the action for you. It's only 2 lines.

[Tracy]

Thanks Dan!! I definitely want to get this, going to practice

[DCurry]

Took about a minute and a half!

One little thing I ran into is when I try to grab the coordinates of the box to designate the region, sometimes you have to grab it twice. For some reason sometimes it just doesn't change the numbers that are in there the first time.