How to pull a variable's value from a doc using ExtendScript

[Adam Hollett]

Hey there!

I'm a technical writing student just getting my feet wet in a work placement. One of the things I've been doing is trying to improve the workflow here and cut down on repetitive tasks.

To that end I've created an ExtendScript which grabs the most recent version of each of our 18 FrameMaker documents and saves them as PDFs in a network folder.

All of our books feature an 'Issue Number' variable which indicates if there have been any revisions to the document since the last product release. The issue number is featured in the output PDF's file name. Right now the script contains a record of each issue number which it inserts, but this must be updated manually any time the FrameMaker files are updated.

The script iterates through the list of books that I have, opens each book and saves it as a PDF. What I would like to have it do is grab the value of the 'Issue Number' variable from each book just before it is saved and include that number in the filename, rather than the number which is currently manually specified as a book property in the array of FrameMaker documents.

This is my first time using JavaScript or ExtendScript. Google has been helpful with scripting but I haven't been able to Google this particular issue because any search I make that includes the word 'variable' inevitably gives me results discussing JavaScript or ExtendScript variables rather than specifically FrameMaker variables.

Any ES experts out there able to throw me a line?

Thanks,

Adam Hollett
Customer Documentation
Solace Systems
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