Indiscripts

So you have discovered a beautiful typeface that you want to leverage for your layout. Unfortunately some accented characters, diacritics, or needed symbols are missing. Thanks to IndyFont you can easily create a complementary font that will provide those missing glyphs. Then, as an experienced InDesign user, you'll probably be tempted to manage the whole character set through GREP styles. FontMixer offers a very cool alternative based on a secret feature available in InDesign CS5 and later…

For obscure reasons ExtendScript 3.x is somewhat allergic to the character "\x00" (U+0000). Some String and RegExp routines become silently defective as soon as your source string contains one or more NUL character. Although most of these bugs have been fixed in CS5 (ExtendScript 4.1), this still leads to compatibility and portability issues. Here is a snippet that allows to split any string and get proper results in all versions.

A number of InDesign scripts manipulate words for counting, indexing, or other processing purposes. Given a text container—basically a Story—the InDesign Scripting DOM provides many ways to handle text contents through specialized subclasses of the Text interface: one can easily access to insertion points, character ranges, lines, paragraphs, text columns, styled-text chunks, and… words. Although this concept seems pretty straightforward, I tried to understand a bit better what it really means.

Le contrôle des espaces (chasse, justification, etc.) est le lieu d'une divergence historique entre XPress et InDesign. Tandis qu'InDesign propose une douzaine d'espaces distinctes qui semblent emprisonnées dans leur sémantique Unicode, XPress a souvent été considéré comme un outil plus flexible du fait qu'il ouvre à l'utilisateur le pouvoir de définir lui-même les valeurs d'espacement et les plages de variation dont il a besoin. Cependant, le déficit d'InDesign n'est pas aussi définitif qu'il y paraît…