Indiscripts

Driven by a mix of vanity and liberalness I decided to make public the building blocks of my InDesign scripting framework, which I called IdExtenso. The alpha release is now available on my GitHub account and will be regularly extended in the coming weeks and months…

Extending the capabilities of Creative Cloud apps is a Grail Quest for many users. Although it has been made possible (almost blindly) with Adobe Configurator, the new HTML panel architecture requires a huge cognitive leap. Alas and alack, no adequate documentation is available that would both synthesize knowledge and accompany learning. I mean, was available! Thanks to Davide Barranca and its “PhotoShop panels development” book and course, every developer can now access a solid, unfragmented information about Adobe HTML panels and extensions. And convert theory into practice…

Hey new visitors and InDesign fans! You probably haven't noticed the discreet question mark in the navigation bar, which connects you to the Help page. You'll find there a bunch of internal links, scripts, and goodies. Enjoy!

Considering the size of the PDF, below, you could think that InDesign CC offers plenty of new features. But that's just an optical illusion! In fact, the vast majority of members introduced into the Scripting DOM regard QR Code's API, which is based on the recurring methods createEmailQRCode(), createHyperlinkQRCode(), createPlainTextQRCode(), createTextMsgQRCode(), and createVCardQRCode().

Apart from that a very small number of innovations is identifiable in the scripting area of InDesign CC—most are relative to look-and-feel and EPUB Export options. What is not highlighted here, however, is the fact that many ScriptUI features are now broken, or partially locked. The new InDesign skin subsystem introduces drastic limitations in the way scripters can customize oldschool user interfaces. For example, ScriptUI fonts do not seem to be supported anymore, and many event types or listeners (focus, onDraw…) are quite defective for various widgets. Also, FlashPlayer embedding leads to critical issues—as it has been reported that invokePlayerFunction() just does not work anymore. In short: very bad news for InDesign developers!

• See also:
— “So What's New in InDesign CS6 Scripting DOM”
— “So What's New in InDesign CS5.5 Scripting DOM”
— “So What's New in InDesign CS5 Scripting DOM”

New tools, new solutions, new ideas, emerge every day for and from InDesign and Creative Suite heroes. But strangely enough, most graphic designers and InDesign end-users still ignore—or cannot measure—the power of automation. As a kind of proof of concept I decided to start the year with a celebration of the most noticeable scripts, tools and resources that have shaken 2012 in this area. Since I use Twitter as a bookmarking platform, it seemed fun to compile a selection of links I've tweeted or re-tweeted during the last 12 months. This is also an opportunity to pay tribute to my colleagues, scripters, developers, trainers, and time-savers! Now make yourself comfortable and enter in the Productive Dome…

My colleague and friend, Peter Kahrel, just put online the version 2.0 of his great eBook, “ScriptUI for Dummies”, a free PDF which teaches us everything about designing and scripting user interfaces based on the Adobe CS ScriptUI module.

The interesting thing about tracking Scripting DOM changes from InDesign CS5 to InDesign CS5.5 is that this instantly reveals the main innovations of this ‘mid-cycle’ release —so that scripters can easily focus on the freshest features. The below PDFs offer you in a snap the tip of the iceberg: the new Article component and a bunch of new export options (HTMLExportPreference, EPubExportPreference, StyleExportTagMap, ObjectExportOption) that indicate the much greater integration of InDesign EPUB and digital publishing capabilities. Enjoy!

• See also: “So What's New in InDesign CS5 Scripting DOM”