Indiscripts

Equalizer 2.07 for InDesign CS4 supports five languages. The script now provides English (default), French, German, Russian and Arabic UI strings depending on the application locale.

Equalizer for InDesign CS4 is an all-in-one tool which allows you to pick up, swap, transfer and propagate size and/or location coordinates between objects. The script fits into the InDesign UI by expanding the contextual menu you get when right-clicking an object. Just install Equalizer.js in the Startup Scripts subfolder and you have the Equalizer features within arm's reach.

Believe me or not, the InDesign DOM can't return directly the width and the height of a page item frame! Scripting beginners may be confused about this gap. There are many pitfalls to be aware of when we deal with dimensions and units. Let's talk about bounds and coordinate spaces...

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.

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!”

The task of reinjecting the InDesign footnotes into your main text might seem unusual, but there are some circumstances where you will be happy to have the “UnFoot” script close at hand.

When you need your script's user interface to be translated according to the InDesign application locale, the common approch is to invoke the localization ExtendScript feature. The process is pretty straightforward, except that —in a verbose UI— you will have to create and manage many “localization objects”.

When he was working on the terrific Ibsen's “Brand” eBook, Klaus Nordby asked me for a little gadget to finish off the building of his work. He needed a “page-timeline-indicator” graphic at the bottom, which visualizes the exact place the reader is currently reading. So what the book designer wanted for Christmas (or before!) was a neat InDesign script which automatically calculates such a timeline walker and shows the input. Let us see how Klaus' prayer has been answered...

Sometimes you just need to test a short snippet without having to create and install a complete script. Suppose you want to check some object properties, or to evaluate a simple JavaScript expression. It is easy to write and interprete your instructions from the ExtendScript Toolkit, but it would be even faster to do the whole job from the InDesign user interface.