Indiscripts

New tools, new solutions, new ideas, emerge every day for and from InDesign and Creative Suite heroes. But strangely enough, most graphic designers and InDesign end-users still ignore—or cannot measure—the power of automation. As a kind of proof of concept I decided to start the year with a celebration of the most noticeable scripts, tools and resources that have shaken 2012 in this area. Since I use Twitter as a bookmarking platform, it seemed fun to compile a selection of links I've tweeted or re-tweeted during the last 12 months. This is also an opportunity to pay tribute to my colleagues, scripters, developers, trainers, and time-savers! Now make yourself comfortable and enter in the Productive Dome…

My colleague and friend, Peter Kahrel, just put online the version 2.0 of his great eBook, “ScriptUI for Dummies”, a free PDF which teaches us everything about designing and scripting user interfaces based on the Adobe CS ScriptUI module.

InDesign CS6 is full of new features, which explains the size (98 pages) of the Object Members part in our tracking-change PDF below. Of course many additions regard interactivity, form behaviors and the related events. The Scripting DOM now includes the following ubiquitous collections: checkBoxes, comboBoxes, listBoxes, radioButtons, signatureFields, textBoxes. A number of existing objects have been extended accordingly.

Besides, there are many interesting additions to discover and experiment. Have fun!

• See also:
— “So What's New in InDesign CS5.5 Scripting DOM”
— “So What's New in InDesign CS5 Scripting DOM”

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.

The interesting thing about tracking Scripting DOM changes from InDesign CS5 to InDesign CS5.5 is that this instantly reveals the main innovations of this ‘mid-cycle’ release —so that scripters can easily focus on the freshest features. The below PDFs offer you in a snap the tip of the iceberg: the new Article component and a bunch of new export options (HTMLExportPreference, EPubExportPreference, StyleExportTagMap, ObjectExportOption) that indicate the much greater integration of InDesign EPUB and digital publishing capabilities. Enjoy!

• See also: “So What's New in InDesign CS5 Scripting DOM”

Twelve months have passed since the publication of the first article on this website. Thanks to you visitors, bloggers, Twitter subscribers, script users and developers, Indiscripts.com gradually becomes a place to share and discover the most productive scripts for Adobe InDesign. Well, now to the gift! From today until June 6, Indiscripts offers a special 25% discount on BookBarcode and Wordalizer PRO versions. All you need to do is just fill in the order form until next sunday. Enjoy!

As a present for Christmas, here is a compilation of the greatest links we've tweeted during those last 3 months. An overwhelming majority regards InDesign scripting, plug-ins, GREP and/or JavaScript resources for ‘InDevelopers’.