Indiscripts

Freya Holmér premiered in August a grandiose tutorial video, The Beauty of Bézier Curves, that every developer and/or graphic designer should watch! Especially if you are interested in the internal coding of outlines and path points in InDesign…

Computing Bézier curves that really look like sine waves is an exciting challenge for script developers. One needs to deal with both optimizing control points, transforming coordinate spaces and splitting curves. Here is a function that solves it all in ExtendScript for InDesign…

While studying bounding boxes and transformations I realized we could get nice patterns based on successive rotations applied to a given shape. As InDesign instantly determines the coordinates of the enclosing rectangle whatever the page item transform state, I had fun in drawing those boxes while varying strokes and angles. Jongware made similar experiments with its famous Spirographs script. RagingHull is just another free toy that reveals the bounds of a spinning object…

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!”