Indiscripts

Ce mardi, l'équipe du InDesign User Group Paris (anciennement IDUG, dorénavant Adobe UserGroup) a accueilli votre serviteur en grandes pompes — enfin, pointure 42, n'exagérons rien — pour une initiation en douceur au framework IdExtenso. Plutôt que de m'égarer dans une technicité inaudible, j'ai profité de cette invitation pour rassembler quelques repères sur le scripting InDesign, échantillons à l'appui, avec des pistes pour les développeurs plus motivés. En résulte un PDF que j'ai la faiblesse de tenir pour un bon préambule si vous vous lancez dans l'automatisation pour InDesign : IdExtenso-Slides.pdf (1,4 Mo).

Collecting proper names is one of the most common tasks assigned to IndexMatic². While the best strategy remains the one based on character styles, not all InDesign books are prepared to receive style-driven queries. Instead, you may have a comprehensive list of <LastName>, <FirstName> items…

User's question: “What's the difference between Multiply by and Rescale to in Equalizer? It looks like both functions have the same effect on the targeted frames of my document.” Very good question indeed! Let's reveal the little subtleties behind it…

As an InDesign maniac I often use it for achieving tasks that would normally involve Illustrator or Photoshop. The best example of this deviance is PNG conversion. You read it well! And here is a tool that translates any InDesign shape, group, or whatever, into a PNG stream. Not a big deal, but let me explain…

Finally available is a patched release of BookBarcode 2 (v2.036) purposed to improve the support of recent InDesign versions. While the code still perfectly works in CS4 and CS5 (CS3 support is abandoned) we have fixed various issues reported in either CS6 or the CC series…

Driven by a mix of vanity and liberalness I decided to make public the building blocks of my InDesign scripting framework, which I called IdExtenso. The alpha release is now available on my GitHub account and will be regularly extended in the coming weeks and months…

User's question: “I have to enter in measurements to HurryCover that have more than four decimal point, such as .859375 inches. HC lets you enter this but then rounds it up to four spaces instead of the six that were entered. Is it actually making it the correct size and rounding up the number?”…

JsxBlind 1.007 is available today—still for free—and now delivered in two formats: a standalone script (JsxBlindRun.jsx) that offers a quick and easy way to scramble a JSXBIN file straight from InDesign (as previously), and a “includable library” (JsxBlindLib.jsxinc) that provides advanced options to developers who need to plug JsxBlind features in an automated workflow (ESTK extension, panel development process, or any custom framework.)

How much do you spend on manually repositioning objects, resizing or adjusting all frames when your layout is changing? How many times did you need to move all main blocks by a given offset on every page? Or to reset the scale of every inner image? Think about the time you lost in repeating those daily boring tasks again and again, then take a giant step in loading Equalizer 3 in your InDesign toolbox. Batch positioning and resizing in InDesign is now as easy as clicking the Run button…