Indiscripts

The latest version of InDesign provides an internal solution for formatting math formulas. The underlying technology is a UXP WebView panel (Math Expressions) interacting with MathJax, a popular JavaScript package capable of processing maths in various formats. In this case, MathML as input and SVG as output…

If you visit this website from time to time, you know that it contains a plethora of free InDesign scripts, but you may not know that other cool nuggets are regularly open-sourced in our GitHub repository called IdGoodies. The latter being hardly documented, here is an overview of some scripts—and interesting code snippets—you will find there…

Computing Bézier curves that really look like sine waves is an exciting challenge for script developers. One needs to deal with both optimizing control points, transforming coordinate spaces and splitting curves. Here is a function that solves it all in ExtendScript for InDesign…

Many fonts offer a wide range of Unicode characters. Does your text require a 'Ű'? Minion Pro has it. Go to U+0170 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DOUBLE ACUTE. Or do you need an umbrella glyph? Segoe UI Emoji supports U+2602… Of course you can access any element from the Glyphs panel, but when you already know the codepoint to be rendered, why not just ask InDesign to parse the code you've just entered?…

Some InDesign documents rely on a set of user-defined text variables that expect to be updated on every new project. Think about that ISBN number which appears at different places and must be edited consistently. Variables are great, but InDesign makes them painful to handle. Hence the present script, which automatically opens an edit box whenever a variable is selected…

Hey scripters, are you familiar with InDesign events, event listeners, menu actions, idle tasks? That's the hot focus of the 12th ISFR. Plus a fine selection of threads and snippets involving GREP, text, CMYK swatches, IDML, transformations… Enjoy the ride!

While fine-tuning a layout you usually need to put some dummy text in your template. The common way to fill a frame with lorem-ipsum-like data is to call Type > Fill with Placeholder Text. But sometimes you already have an actual text in place, and then your missing feature is the ability to scramble existing characters. Thanks to IdExtenso we can write a nice and fast scrambler, based on Markov chains…