JavaScripting InDesign

The question came up this morning on how to get the overset text in a story. I interpreted that as meaning how to get a reference to it and banged out a quick reply. But this got me musing about how to write a release independent function that would do this for either a story or a cell in a table. I came up with this function (which expects to receive either a story or a cell):

function getOversetText(textFlow) {
 if (!textFlow.overflows) return null;
 var start = textFlow.characters[0];
 if (textFlow instanceof Cell) {
   if (textFlow.characters.length > 0) {
     start = textFlow.texts[0].characters[textFlow.contents.length];
   }
 } else {
   if (Number(String(app.version.split(".")[0])) > 4) {
     var myTFs = textFlow.textContainers;
   } else {
     var myTFs = textFlow.textFrames;
   }
   for (var j = myTFs.length - 1; j >= 0; j--) {
     if (myTFs[j].characters.length > 0) {
       start = textFlow.characters[myTFs[j].characters[-1].index + 1];
       break;
     }
   }
 }
 return textFlow.texts.itemByRange(start, textFlow.texts[0].characters[-1]);
}

I confess that I haven't tested this in CS, but I have in both CS2 and CS3 where it works. It should work in CS also.

But notice the assymetry between working with cells and working with stories. Even though the contents of a cell returns only the non-overset text, if you access the characters of a cell you get the lot, overset or not. So, to get the index of the first overset character in a cell, I had to use the length of the contents rather than the index of the last character plus 1, which is what I first tried to use.