Indiscripts

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…

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.

As opened in the “InDesign Scripting Forum: 25 ‘sticky’ posts” article, I will regularly feed this “Extras” section with recommended discussions and/or snippets which I have contributed to through the ID Scripting Forum. Here is the scripting stuff I found specially interesting over the last six months…

Notice to all indexing experts! IndexMatic 2.025 for InDesign has just been released with an impressive number of new features and goodies: the Hit Report retrieves words and stats before indexing, the Query Editor has been entirely redesigned, queries now allow comments and cross-references, and finally IndexMatic's regular expressions support Unicode properties and five additional metacharacters “you can't live without.”

A number of InDesign scripts manipulate words for counting, indexing, or other processing purposes. Given a text container—basically a Story—the InDesign Scripting DOM provides many ways to handle text contents through specialized subclasses of the Text interface: one can easily access to insertion points, character ranges, lines, paragraphs, text columns, styled-text chunks, and… words. Although this concept seems pretty straightforward, I tried to understand a bit better what it really means.