This seems unlikely, but I'm constantly amazed by these forums, so here goes:

Is it possible to select two or more text frames and merge them into one text frame with the same content?

I don't see any function like this in the program or help documentation, but maybe somebody knows of a script?

You can use declarations with InDemand - basically it pulls out (collects) text and or images for you to repurpose the copy/text.
Also a really fast way of placing the text into layout text boxes.

video tutorials and the app available at www.mymacmac.com/InDemand/InDemand.html
I think apple.com downloads also has it

hope thats some sort of help

Mike M

If the frame overlap each other, you can "merge" them by using the "Add" command of the Pathfinder panel.

If they don't overlap, you can link them together.

But if there is a different scenario, could you explain it better.

Hi Sandee,
Thanks for answering my post.

Unfortunately the text frames don't ever overlap and linking them together won't work. Let me explain:

I have inx files that I need to translate. When the inx files were created, logical sentences were not always grouped into text frames (as you can see in this screenshot):

<http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/118583/ID3%20text%20boxes%20to%20merge.png>

This example show two text frames that have half a sentence each:
"Direct link to 3rd party finance and"
and then below that
"vehicle validation system via Reg No"

The problem is that when I open the inx file in the translation client these sentences are displayed as two 'segments' making translating very difficult. At present I'm manually, cutting, pasting text from one frame into another and then deleting the now empty frame. Not terrible, but certainly more time consuming than a process or script that would allow me to select two or more text frames and merge them by running the operation.

Sorry for my highly non-technical explanation. As you can see, I'm only working with ID to pre-treat documents for translation, so a lot of this is very unfamiliar to me.

I believe that there is a script that comes with ID that will export all the text in dis-jointed frames into one text file.

From that script, you can then re-import the file into a single story.

Warning: It is very possible that two sentence fragments will join together improperly. For instance two fragments such as:

He went to
eat the dinner.

Would be joined together as:

He went toeat the dinner.

That is going to confuse you.

Now, I just had an idea. Try exporting the sentence fragment ID pages as PDF files.

PDF has a pretty good export to RTF text that may be "smart" enough to add a space between the fragments.

Why doesn't threading work? That would do the same thing as cutting and pasting. Or is the problem that the first frame is too small to contain the text.

What do you mean by "inx client"? Is that some non-InDesign application that is interpreting and presenting the contents of the inx? If so, then you're dealing with a bug in it.

Dave

I don't know about merging text frames but there is a slightly easier way to add the text together into one frame then copy and pasting. I would turn on drag and drop editing in layout mode and just select and drag the text into one frame. Unless you deactivate it, the drag and drop editing automatically adds spaces when you insert text, so that removes that problem. Once you have it all combined, you can then select and delete all the left over empty text frames.