Indiscripts

BookBarcode (formerly ‘EANDesign’) is an easy-to-use barcode builder for InDesign. Intended for design and print professionals, book cover designers, self publishers, package label designers, this powerful script helps you produce, edit, validate, and manage high quality EAN-13 barcodes without leaving InDesign. No need of barcode font, external resource, or linked EPS. The whole job is performed in InDesign: BookBarcode creates a native vector and fully manipulable object in your document.

Pour des raisons que j'aurais du mal à appuyer sur des bases orthotypographiques solides, j'éprouve de l'empathie pour les mots isolés. Quand InDesign décide — fût-ce avec les meilleurs arguments du monde — de rejeter à la ligne le dernier terme d'un paragraphe, une sorte de frisson communautaire me saisit. Par des moyens pas toujours avouables, je tente alors de raccrocher le wagon à son prédécesseur, quitte à lui antéposer manuellement une espace insécable justifiante. Beurk ! Et si l'on appelait les « Styles Grep » à la rescousse...

As a present for Christmas, here is a compilation of the greatest links we've tweeted during those last 3 months. An overwhelming majority regards InDesign scripting, plug-ins, GREP and/or JavaScript resources for ‘InDevelopers’.

The InDesign Pages panel lets you manually rearrange the pages of your publication. To move pages around in the work document, it's just needed to click and drag the page icon(s) within the railroad —while paying attention to ‘shuffling’ effects! JavaScript allows you to automate the same handling, which can be very useful when you have a number of pages to switch.

As illustrated by the YALT technique, it's easy —and powerful!— to let a script read its own bytes while it is running. We could even go further and get a script to update itself to achieve some advanced functionalities.

Believe me or not, the InDesign DOM can't return directly the width and the height of a page item frame! Scripting beginners may be confused about this gap. There are many pitfalls to be aware of when we deal with dimensions and units. Let's talk about bounds and coordinate spaces...

InGutter gives the user the ability to effortlessly create, design and manage a set of rules between text columns in InDesign CS3/CS4. This free JS script implements and extends the technique explored in Indiscripts a few weeks ago. Try the beta version, and tell me.

Rules between columns are so usual —in newspapers, in technical books...— that nobody could explain why InDesign does not yet provide this functionnality. That's a big mystery. Layout designers have anchored objets, Grep styles, conditional texts and so much great tools improved by leaps and bounds, but vertical column rules, please? “Move along now, there's nothing to see!”