Indiscripts

In May 2010, Loïc Aigon and I have written the first draft of ReportPageHyphens, a quite basic script which is used to inventory all unattractive hyphens that occur between two pages. The preliminary version of RPH has been released in Scriptopedia and was supposed to work in InDesign CS4. Since then we have found several bugs and issues. Some of them have been reported in Scriptopedia's comment page, or in the Adobe InDesign forum. The main user request was that the script can also identify unwanted hyphens that appear in footnotes. Should we try a new approach?

While Photoshop has a handy Actions panel that gives you the ability to record and playback simple operations, InDesign provides no way —without scripting!— to automate those daily repetitive tasks. But, hey!, why not use a script to mimic such action manager? This is my very first step in that direction...

A few days ago, Stijn Debrouwere has disclosed Extendables, an unprecedented open source framework for Adobe ExtendScript. So exciting! This project will interest many script developers, especially those dealing with InDesign. “If you're doing any serious scripting, Extendables will definitely make your life easier,” Stijn said. “It includes some of the newer Javascript 1.6+ Array methods like forEach, useful shortcuts/monkeypatches and modules for logging, HTTP connections and creating user interfaces.” I tested for you this yet young but already powerful scripting catalyst.

What's in my Twitter bag from the last eight months? A lot of links, of course! The below selection only focuses on some of them —not necessarily the most popular ones, but preferably the ones you may have missed.

In the previous episode we learned that every scripting DOM object is in fact an object specifier, which acts like a path in the InDesign object tree. Collection's methods only allow us to build object specifiers. Invoking a property or a method provided by a specifier causes InDesign to send a “verb-first command” to the underlying receiver(s). We will now consider how this process impacts your code, what is returned into your script and how to deal with some side effects.

Every collection in the scope of the InDesign Scripting DOM provides a method called everyItem. It remained undocumented until InDesign CS3, but scripting experts such as Dave Saunders had already pointed out its forcefulness and already knew how to exploit it. Here are some details about this esoteric syntax.

Twelve months have passed since the publication of the first article on this website. Thanks to you visitors, bloggers, Twitter subscribers, script users and developers, Indiscripts.com gradually becomes a place to share and discover the most productive scripts for Adobe InDesign. Well, now to the gift! From today until June 6, Indiscripts offers a special 25% discount on BookBarcode and Wordalizer PRO versions. All you need to do is just fill in the order form until next sunday. Enjoy!

This post is now obsolete. Please check out the new version of Wordalizer.

Wordalizer is a “word cloud” generator written in JavaScript for InDesign CS4 and CS5 (Mac and Win). The current stable release (v. 1.25) is based on a new lexical parser that runs up to 100X faster than the previous beta! It also provides a number of improvements and new features: 6 source languages supported, a full word list editor, session-persistent settings, ability to rework from the active cloud, control of the minimum word length, “rarest words” option, 15 color shemes... “This script is cool, hot, and sick all at the same time. I love it.” — David Blatner, InDesignSecrets.