Indiscripts

Geometry in InDesign can get deadly complex. Take a document, create a frame, insert a table, change a particular cell into a “graphic cell,” convert its inner object into an ellipse, play with strokes, rotate and scale the object, transform the parent frame in the fanciest way. Then ask yourself the question: what are the exact coordinates, shape or area of the final table cell?…

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…

How much do you spend on manually repositioning objects, resizing or adjusting all frames when your layout is changing? How many times did you need to move all main blocks by a given offset on every page? Or to reset the scale of every inner image? Think about the time you lost in repeating those daily boring tasks again and again, then take a giant step in loading Equalizer 3 in your InDesign toolbox. Batch positioning and resizing in InDesign is now as easy as clicking the Run button…

Chapter 4 of our “Spaces & Transform” eBook is probably both the trickiest and the most important. It tries to reveal the intricacies behind the Scripting DOM resolve() method, the unique tool for setting and processing InDesign locations with respect to the underlying coordinate systems. I spent months figuring out its obscure syntax and improving my knowledge on that particular topic. Understanding the location resolver is a crucial step for developing scripts that can deal in depth with geometry and transformations in InDesign.

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Dealing with coordinate spaces and transformation matrices is one of the most obscure and underappreciated exercises in InDesign scripting and programming. The fault mainly lies with Adobe documentation, especially the Scripting DOM reference, which does not clearly explain the topic and some of its essential keys. The following document (PDF, Chapters 1-3) attempts to shed some light on the beast…

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Suppose you need to shift a bunch of text frames by 10mm from the central axis of your layout (10mm to the right for right-hand pages, 10mm to the left for left-hand pages). Or suppose you have to reset to 90% the height of every picture owned by your "Thumbnails" layer… over the whole document! Or imagine any other daily boring task that involves changing locations and/or dimensions of objects in a repeated way. Equalizer 3 is just a powerful tool for designers who want to save their phalanges.

Dealing with groups is a major headache for InDesign scripters. On one hand, the Group object has no injection method to offer, which makes difficult to append existing page items into a given group. On the other hand, although the Groups API exposes a promising add() method, nobody has ever managed to use this feature from any PageItem.groups area, so we seem doomed to perpetually rebuild groups from scratch.