Indiscripts

Notice to all indexing experts! IndexMatic 2.025 for InDesign has just been released with an impressive number of new features and goodies: the Hit Report retrieves words and stats before indexing, the Query Editor has been entirely redesigned, queries now allow comments and cross-references, and finally IndexMatic² regular expressions support Unicode properties and five additional metacharacters “you can't live without.”

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.

In May 2010, Loïc Aigon and I have written the first draft of ReportPageHyphens, a quite basic script which is used to inventory all unattractive hyphens that occur between two pages. The preliminary version of RPH has been released in Scriptopedia and was supposed to work in InDesign CS4. Since then we have found several bugs and issues. Some of them have been reported in Scriptopedia's comment page, or in the Adobe InDesign forum. The main user request was that the script can also identify unwanted hyphens that appear in footnotes. Should we try a new approach?

Surprisingly, JavaScript offers no easy way to alphabetize words in relevant order. Although the Array.sort() method is known to perform, by default, a lexicographical sort, you will find very quickly that the result is wrong in most real-life situations. Actually, the internal mechanism of JS sorting is confined to compare Unicode characters by their code points, so 'Z' (U+005A) comes before 'e' (U+0065), which itself comes before 'ç' (U+00E7), etc. Also, you have all noted with vexation that InDesign does not offer any alphabetical sort feature! Here is an experimental tool to help restore order in Latin alphabets.

This post is now obsolete. Please check out the new version of Wordalizer.

Wordalizer is a “word cloud” generator written in JavaScript for InDesign CS4 and CS5 (Mac and Win). The current stable release (v. 1.25) is based on a new lexical parser that runs up to 100X faster than the previous beta! It also provides a number of improvements and new features: 6 source languages supported, a full word list editor, session-persistent settings, ability to rework from the active cloud, control of the minimum word length, “rarest words” option, 15 color shemes... “This script is cool, hot, and sick all at the same time. I love it.” — David Blatner, InDesignSecrets.

Is it possible to automatically stretch a text according to its length? The question is simple and the answer is not that complex, thanks to the InDesign Grep Styles.