Indiscripts

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!”

In the previous episode, we designed a light-weighted markup syntax for localized strings of any JavaScript based projects. Now let's see how to get a generic and simple access to those L10N data.

When he was working on the terrific Ibsen's “Brand” eBook, Klaus Nordby asked me for a little gadget to finish off the building of his work. He needed a “page-timeline-indicator” graphic at the bottom, which visualizes the exact place the reader is currently reading. So what the book designer wanted for Christmas (or before!) was a neat InDesign script which automatically calculates such a timeline walker and shows the input. Let us see how Klaus' prayer has been answered...

Sometimes you just need to test a short snippet without having to create and install a complete script. Suppose you want to check some object properties, or to evaluate a simple JavaScript expression. It is easy to write and interprete your instructions from the ExtendScript Toolkit, but it would be even faster to do the whole job from the InDesign user interface.

JavaScript is often considered as a weakly typed language. It means —among other things— that we don't need to tell explicitly what kind of variables we handle, or what kind of arguments we provide to a given function. String? Integer? Boolean? In most cases, everything will work without ever declaring the type.