Indiscripts

From CC 2014, InDesign and Illustrator interfaces needed to adapt to OS “scale settings” strategy on 4K/Retina displays. And with Windows 10 defaultly scaling at 150% in such resolutions, Adobe engineers were forced to rework their famous HiDPI support, which led to introduce UI Scaling in the Preferences dialog box. So far, so good. But ScriptUI has not been fully “informed” of these new rules…

A few weeks ago, the Finnish developer Joonas Pääkkö soberly released a web app for designing ScriptUI dialogs, from scratch, just using a graphical interface. In the words of G. Singelmann, a truly amazing “ScriptUI Scaffolder.” Prepare to be wowed…

ScriptUI provides a set of usual mouse events (mouseover, mousedown, mouseup, click…) which are of primary interest in responsive user interfaces (UI). Developers can add event listeners to any UI component that needs to respond accordingly when the mouse enters the scene. But handling such events requires carefulness if your script has to support both CS and CC environments.

A lot of users and customers are anxiously awaiting updates of BookBarcode, IndexMatic, and other Indiscripts' tools that still refuse to properly work in InDesign CC. “Why does it take so long to have my favorite script running in my new environment?”, they ask…

A sprite usually refers to a primary image which is integrated in a larger scene. The term was popularized by Dave Shea in his 2004 article “CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death” which describes how to render the multiple states of a button or icon from a single composite image. I discovered that we can derive this technique to create attractive buttons in ScriptUI 4.0 and later…

Skinning a user interface with ScriptUI may be tricky as soon as you want to apply custom fonts to specific fields or controls. Besides the ScriptUI object model does not offer intuitive solutions to that purpose, we also have to cope with a few cross-platform issues…

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.