Indiscripts

Automating InDesign since 2009

Tag : TextFrame

SmartSort 1.21 for InDesign CC/CS6/CS5/CS4

SmartSort, free script for InDesign CC/CS6/CS5/CS4SmartSort is a free InDesign script that sorts paragraphs or cells. It produces a lexicographic order consistent with the language considered. Version 1.21 fixes an issue related to case discrimination in various ‘tailored’ languages. It also deals with the letter ⟨ё⟩ in Russian.

Continue reading...

InDesign Scripting: Why are Endnotes so Hard to Decipher?

InDesign's endnotes are just text ranges enclosed in U+FEFF markers.

Continue reading...

On the Hidden “Em-Box” Option

A secret Baseline Option is available in InDesign…

Continue reading...

AutoStick | Simple Diagrams Made Easy

Duplicate and Link Text Frames by just typing magic keys.

Continue reading...

‘Ultrafluid’ Line Wrap in InDesign

A typographer friend of mine wonders about the most convenient way to create text samples having arbitrary line wraps without hyphenation. Such layout is commonly used in foundries when preparing typographical specimens. Customers should be able to visualize the native behavior of the typeface without justification artifacts, therefore the sample text must be left-justified with no custom tracking/kerning/scaling applied…

Continue reading...

Getting Started with InGutter 2 for InDesign CS4-CC [UPDATE]

InGutter 2 (script for InDesign CS4/CS5/CS6/CC)

Continue reading...

InGutter | Inset Spacing, Gutter and Global Width

InGutter users often ask the following question: “When the script creates inner rules it also creates an inset around the whole frame. But my layout needs to go the full width of the text frame. How could I prevent InGutter from adding unwanted left and right inset?” The short answer is: you can't! OK, so can we deal with that constraint?

Continue reading...

Cloning and Syncing Objects in ID CS5.5

Factorization is a profound paradigm in graphic design. Of course designers want to focus on newness, and they hate repeat what is already done. But this is a hard battle, because their work is mainly about pattern, analogy, iteration, derivation, and update, so they often have to deal with reusing the same stuff in a different way. Let's go further on this subject.

Continue reading...

How to Detect a “Ghost Item”

A “ghost item” is an anchored / inline page item (text frame, spline item, etc.) which is temporarily hidden because its parent character is in an overset area:

Example of ‘ghost’ anchored item.

Continue reading...

What Exactly is a Word?

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.

Continue reading...

A Simple Script to Fix Table Widows

FixTableWidows in action (InDesign CS4/CS5).

Continue reading...

Report Page Hyphens 2.0 (beta)

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?

Continue reading...

Show Local Formatting in InDesign CS4/CS5

Show Local Formatting in InDesign

Continue reading...

InGutter | Script Available for Beta Test

InGutter gives the user the ability to effortlessly create, design and manage a set of rules between text columns in InDesign CS3/CS4. This free JS script implements and extends the technique explored in Indiscripts a few weeks ago. Try the beta version, and tell me.

Continue reading...

Introducing InDesign Column Rules

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!”

Continue reading...