Indiscripts

Affairé à délester mes répertoires de vieux scripts InDesign antédiluviens, je tombe sur un petit utilitaire qui me semble encore digne d'emploi chez les orthotypographes. Sa mission ? Repositionner les appels de note avant toute ponctuation fermante, comme l'exige la tradition…

In a recent tutorial from ExpertsGraphiques (in French), Pierre Labbe has demonstrated a GREP-based method to merge two adjacent columns in a table while preserving the corresponding rows. It lies in fact that InDesign does not offer a so basic functionality! The “Merge cells” feature (which you access from the Table menu) is confined to globally merge all selected cells in a single one. Although P. Labbe showed great ingenuity, it seemed natural to investigate a more effective approach…

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?

A few days ago, Stijn Debrouwere has disclosed Extendables, an unprecedented open source framework for Adobe ExtendScript. So exciting! This project will interest many script developers, especially those dealing with InDesign. “If you're doing any serious scripting, Extendables will definitely make your life easier,” Stijn said. “It includes some of the newer Javascript 1.6+ Array methods like forEach, useful shortcuts/monkeypatches and modules for logging, HTTP connections and creating user interfaces.” I tested for you this yet young but already powerful scripting catalyst.

Comme l'avait souligné Thomas Phinney dans son célèbre billet « World-Ready Composer in Adobe CS4 », InDesign embarque depuis la CS4 une ribambelle d'outils secrets capables de gérer l'écriture de droite à gauche propre à certaines langues, la bidirectionnalité et autres fonctionnalités qu'on pensait jusqu'alors réservées à InDesign ME. Ces goodies restent peu documentés mais sont déjà largement expérimentables grâce au scripting.

Ok, we have a way to move back footnotes into our main story (see ‘UnFoot’, August 2009). Now is it possible to reverse the operation? More generally, how to convert markup text into footnotes through InDesign? Here is a simple ReFoot script for CS4++ users...

“Rotate the spread view” is a nice feature introduced in InDesign CS4. It will prevent you from getting a stiff neck when working on rotated contents such as book spine or landscape tables. Great! Now the bad news: it seems that the DOM does not provide any means to check a rotated spread by scripting. No property, no access method. So what?