June 14, 2016 | Tips
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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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May 03, 2016 | Tips
| en |
Without doubt this is a “very bad practice.” When it comes to naming arguments and variables, every programmer should prefer descriptive and intention-revealing names over short forms. We all read this rule in Clean Coding bibles. Tokens like userName, swatchArray, or currentWordCount sound of course much better than s, a, and i…
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April 19, 2016 | Equalizer
| en | fr |
While achieving Equalizer 3 I have implemented new—and old!—functionalities such as the Page Side Selector (so that you can manipulate right-sided pages only, for example) and (the much awaited return of) the Swap items feature. Here are a few snapshots of the next version…
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April 06, 2016 | Snippets
| en | fr |
When it comes to pasting text from another document or application, InDesign provides two options, either keeping the original text attributes, fonts, styles (the full 'Paste' feature), or removing all attributes ('Paste without formatting'.) We also have tools and preferences in the field of style mapping, but on many occasions these features do not fit the need of dealing quickly with basic formatting problems. Here RichPaste comes to the rescue…
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March 12, 2016 | Tips
| en |
From what I observed, InDesign scripters do not naturally resort to the dichotomic (or binary) search algorithm when it comes to find a numeric solution to problems as wide as adjusting frame bounds to some constraint, determining an optimal text size, or simply accessing a needle in the haystack. Yet the binary search approach is nearly always the best. So let's make it more popular…
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January 27, 2016 | Snippets
| en |
Here is the new season of the InDesign Scripting Forum Roundup series! In this new episode we shall probe various counter-intuitive concepts and behaviors of the Scripting DOM …and attempt to deliver appropriate solutions!
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December 21, 2015 | JsxBlind
| en |
As Christmas is approaching I wish to share with the scripting community a very unexpected utility, which for legal reasons I can hardly tell anything detailed! Paradoxically, as you shall see, JsxBlind aims to protect script authors from being despoiled…
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December 01, 2015 | Extras
| en |
It took me time to read the second edition of Gregor Fellenz' InDesign automatisieren since I do not speak German (!) but this book certainly is the best print reference for discovering InDesign scripting realm. Non-German speaking readers might find it pointless to review this book on my website. However it fills a huge gap and should be considered a model by many of us…
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October 18, 2015 | Tips
| en |
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…
• Next chapter now available: “Coordinate Spaces & Transformations in InDesign — Chapter 4”
October 14, 2015 | Extras
| en | fr |
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September 07, 2015 | IndexMatic
| en | fr |
IndexMatic 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…
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August 10, 2015 | Snippets
| en |
Summer is the ideal time to deepen your knowledge of InDesign scripting, isn't it? In this new episode of our roundup series we will investigate Page objects, style groups, and a nice selection of practical snippets. Feel free to grab and share the good stuff…
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June 23, 2015 | Equalizer
| en | fr |
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.
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June 10, 2015 | Wordalizer
| en | fr |
For over a year, a sneaky bug was preventing Wordalizer from working in some CC environments. A few users had reported a pasteboard-related error that seemed to occur without definite cause—mainly in InDesign 9.0—and the question was, how to fix a bug which I cannot reproduce on my own testing platforms? Thanks to the patience and responsiveness of Pedro Eisner, a user from Argentina, we finally hit on a solution…
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May 20, 2015 | Tips
| en |
In my previous post I introduced some key concepts and tools for benchmarking Array.sort() and took you through the “standard model” of optimizing the callback function. We also emphasized that, of course, it is impossible to go faster than the native method. If these clues made you sit up and take notice, it's time to go one step further…
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May 13, 2015 | Tips
| en |
The pattern array.sort(compareFunc) is widely used by JavaScript programmers when elements being sorted are not supposed to represent basic strings in the sense of UTF16 ordered character sequences. In particular, sorting numbers forces you to provide that stupid custom compareNumbers routine which, in most cases, just looks like function(x,y){return x-y}. And even when you have to sort actual strings, there are countless situations where the default Unicode code point order is inappropriate. But a question arises: what is the performance cost of using a non-native comparison routine?
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