Illustrator: how to change simultaneously two identical text boxes?

Question

I'm working on a papercraft project and I need to change the order of the tabs. To do so, I have to manually search for the two corresponding number and edit them one at the time.

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Is there any way to select two identical text boxes (94 in this example) and edit them simultaneously, so they both change into 17 at the same time?

Answer 1

You can use Edit → Find and replace. But use it carefully so you don't edit wrong figures. It would be clever to use 2 or 3-digit number series like: 001, 002, 003 etc making it more easy to narrow down search/replace.

Answer 2

Try this script, it will work on the document selection - so make sure both of those texts are selected before you run it.

#target illustrator
function test(){
    var doc = app.activeDocument;
    var sel = doc.selection;
    var thisItem;
    var selectedTextItems = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < sel.length; i++) {
        thisItem = sel[i];
        if (thisItem.typename == "TextFrame") {
            selectedTextItems.push(thisItem);
        }
    }
    if(selectedTextItems.length < 1){
        alert("No text frames were found in your selection.");
        return;
    }
    var newText = prompt("Enter new text for the " + selectedTextItems.length + " selected text-frames.", "");
    if(newText){
        for (var i = 0; i < selectedTextItems.length; i++) {
            selectedTextItems[i].contents = newText;
        }
    }
}
test();

Answer 3

You could use Symbols for the numbers.

Then place Symbol Instances on the artwork, not text objects. Alter 1 symbol and all it's instances will update.