Indiscripts

With its hundreds of interconnected features and its documentation erected in front of you like a Gothic cathedral, IndexMatic³ will undoubtedly inspire you with this fateful question: where to start? And we often start with something concrete, a specific problem that needs to be solved right now. The purpose of this page is to guide you quickly and clearly into the inner workings of the program, from the questions most frequently asked to the tech support…

In this episode we seriously improve the relationship between user settings and user interface. As a result, we get a smart InDesign script that both remembers the choices the user made within the session and adapts to the context, that is, whether the script should target the selection or a larger scope…

In this episode, you will learn how to arrange your code so that it fits into IdExtenso's “modular space.” Modularity is a key term when it comes to maintaining a large-scale project. Even if our sample script is not in itself of pharaonic complexity, we will transform it, as an exercise, into a pure module…

So, you have the root idea and a basic code for your next InDesign script. All is fine. It works so well that you're now planning to release it, which opens additional questions: Will it work everywhere? How do I trace risky functions? What if I need to integrate new features later on? How do I deal with persistent user settings? How to add a basic interface? How will I localize the dialog in other languages? Can I make my script available in a dedicated menu? Will it work in a JSXBIN package as well? Can I obfuscate my code?…

Whichever tool you use to generate an index from your InDesign document, handling homonyms remains a delicate problem. Only humans—or at least smart algorithms—can determine which index entry should be associated to an ambiguous expression. Let's summarize some strategies or workarounds that IndexMatic² supports…

User's question: “What's the difference between Multiply by and Rescale to in Equalizer? It looks like both functions have the same effect on the targeted frames of my document.” Very good question indeed! Let's reveal the little subtleties behind it…

While both IndyFont and Unicode support hyphen variants such as U+2010 HYPHEN, U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN, and of course U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN, it looks like InDesign does not clearly distinguish character from glyph paradigm in this particular topic. In short, InDesign tends to render all hyphen characters using the same prototypical glyph, which is not necessarily in line with your desire…

IndexMatic² is very good at finding recurring text patterns in a document (brands, products, proper names, URLs…) and Wordalizer is very good at making customizable word clouds based on item frequencies. Here is how you can branch the former to the latter…