Highlight text and insert comment into specific Google Doc text

Question

I would like to know if there is a way to highlight a specific word or body of text and insert a comment via some Google API. I realize there is an insert comment method of the drive API, however, the comment generated is for the entire document and not for just a specific part of the text.

Thanks so much.

I'm looking for say the name of a location in the doc, and highlight that word and create a comment. — dacardzmasta, Feb 27 '14 at 01:15

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

So far I've been able to match and highlight all instances of the text "Earth" in my document (the search target string), but I'm still working on adding a comment. Here's the code to do that:

function myFunction() {
  var fileId = 'Id of your Document goes here';
  var background = background || '#FFFF00';  // highlight yellow.
  var target = 'Earth';
  var doc = DocumentApp.openById(fileId);
  var bodyElement = doc.getBody();
  var searchResult = bodyElement.findText(target);

  while (searchResult !== null) {
    var thisElement = searchResult.getElement();
    var thisElementText = thisElement.asText();

    //Logger.log(url);
    thisElementText.setBackgroundColor(searchResult.getStartOffset(), searchResult.getEndOffsetInclusive(),background);

    // search for next match
    searchResult = bodyElement.findText(target, searchResult);
  }
}

That is adapted/copied from here: Can I color certain words in Google Document using Google Apps Script? (technically I didn't adapt much because it's late, and I'm lazy). Still working on adding a comment. Since the key to this has been to isolate "elements" matching the target, I'd suspect just finding a method to add comments to an element and tagging that on to the end of the background coloring step would do it.

Highlight text and insert comment into specific Google Doc text

1 Answers1