In a recent tutorial from ExpertsGraphiques (in French), Pierre Labbe has demonstrated a GREP-based method to merge two adjacent columns in a table while preserving the corresponding rows. It lies in fact that InDesign does not offer a so basic functionality! The “Merge cells” feature (which you access from the Table menu) is confined to globally merge all selected cells in a single one. Although P. Labbe showed great ingenuity, it seemed natural to investigate a more effective approach…
Cloning and Syncing Objects in ID CS5.5
February 18, 2012 | Extras | en | fr
Factorization is a profound paradigm in graphic design. Of course designers want to focus on newness, and they hate repeat what is already done. But this is a hard battle, because their work is mainly about pattern, analogy, iteration, derivation, and update, so they often have to deal with reusing the same stuff in a different way. Let's go further on this subject.
InDesign Scripting Forum Roundup #2
December 26, 2011 | Snippets | en
As opened in the “InDesign Scripting Forum: 25 ‘sticky’ posts” article, I will regularly feed this section with recommended discussions and/or snippets which I have contributed to through the ID Scripting Forum. Here is the scripting stuff I found specially interesting over the last six months…
How to Detect a “Ghost Item”
October 20, 2011 | Tips | en | fr
A “ghost item” is an anchored / inline page item (text frame, spline item, etc.) which is temporarily hidden because its parent character is in an overset area:
IndexMatic 2.025 | New-Release Notes
October 09, 2011 | IndexMatic² | en | fr
Notice to all indexing experts! IndexMatic 2.025 for InDesign has just been released with an impressive number of new features and goodies: the Hit Report retrieves words and stats before indexing, the Query Editor has been entirely redesigned, queries now allow comments and cross-references, and finally IndexMatic² regular expressions support Unicode properties and five additional metacharacters “you can't live without.”
What Exactly is a Word?
September 04, 2011 | Tips | en
A number of InDesign scripts manipulate words for counting, indexing, or other processing purposes. Given a text container—basically a Story—the InDesign Scripting DOM provides many ways to handle text contents through specialized subclasses of the Text interface: one can easily access to insertion points, character ranges, lines, paragraphs, text columns, styled-text chunks, and… words. Although this concept seems pretty straightforward, I tried to understand a bit better what it really means.
Notes on ‘fastEntireScript’ Undo Mode
August 22, 2011 | Tips | en
In April 2009, Thomas Silkjær reported a bug on app.doScript that alters the ‘undo’ feature in InDesign. Although this issue has been fixed in CS5, there are still some pitfalls to beware of when you want to speed up your script through fastEntireScript…
IndexMatic² | Public Release and User's Guide
July 02, 2011 | IndexMatic² | en | fr
IndexMatic² is a powerful and highly configurable word-indexing tool for InDesign CS3, CS4, and CS5+ (Mac and Win). The present release (v. 2.02) offers completely new features: ‘sub-topic’ processing, XML export, InDesign snippet generation, and much more! “This script is a truly wonderful achievement. It's versatile, clever, and lightning fast, and the options are sensible.”—Peter Kahrel, June 2011.
Comparing the Performance of ExtendScript Snippets
June 23, 2011 | Tips | en
Although jsPerf is a very effective tool in a pure JavaScript environment, you may want to benchmark competing code snippets in the specific ExtendScript field. Here is a simple way to test and improve your InDesign scripted functions…
Comment paramétrer les espaces dans InDesign
May 16, 2011 | Extras | fr
Le contrôle des espaces (chasse, justification, etc.) est le lieu d'une divergence historique entre XPress et InDesign. Tandis qu'InDesign propose une douzaine d'espaces distinctes qui semblent emprisonnées dans leur sémantique Unicode, XPress a souvent été considéré comme un outil plus flexible du fait qu'il ouvre à l'utilisateur le pouvoir de définir lui-même les valeurs d'espacement et les plages de variation dont il a besoin. Cependant, le déficit d'InDesign n'est pas aussi définitif qu'il y paraît…
Permutation d'objets dans InDesign (miniscript)
April 19, 2011 | Tips | fr
Non sans témérité, Stéphane Baril et David Deraedt nous ont récemment accueillis sur le plateau de Chips & Tips, la célèbre série d'Adobe TV dédiée à la diététique productivité. Au détour de cet épisode, Loïc Aigon et votre serviteur proposons une sorte de préambule aux techniques d'automatisation et de scripting dans la Creative Suite, avec quelques illustrations simples et directement accessibles aux néophytes. Vous y découvrirez notamment la version embryonnaire du script SwapItems utilisé pour permuter des objets dans une maquette InDesign…
So What's New in InDesign CS5.5 Scripting DOM
April 11, 2011 | Extras | en
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”
InDesign Scripting Forum: 25 ‘sticky’ posts [roundup]
March 07, 2011 | Snippets | en
The InDesign Scripting Forum is an ideal place to post scripting recipes and to address technical issues. I learn a lot from its famous contributors —Dave Saunders, Harbs, Jongware, Peter Kahrel, Kasyan Servetsky, Marijan Tompa… At odd times I post my own brainchilds. Here is a small selection of snippets and topics that I think are worthwhile.
« previous entries - Page 10 of 13 - next entries »
