Indiscripts

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…

Here is the new release of our coolest InDesign toy! Wordalizer 1.5 for InDesign CS4/CS5/CS6/CC can now digest large corpus (up to 1,000 entries) and generate many styles of word clouds, based on geometrical patterns, color themes, or even multiple fonts! Open any source document (or book) and let Wordalizer extract the meaningful vocabulary from your text. Edit the word list as needed and adjust the settings according to your mood.

This is a great day for both typography lovers and InDesign fans! IndyFont is a complete typeface builder for InDesign CS4/CS5/CS6/CC. This new and amazing tool created by Jongware can generate clean and functional OpenType fonts in just a few seconds. Did you ever need to have custom bullets available in your layout? Did you ever imagine to design your own character set, including your logo or any required pictogram, with the ability to edit ligatures, diacritics, oldstyle figures, swashes or any alternate? You no longer have to buy and master a complex font editor to have it done! Check out IndyFont and enjoy drawing from A to Z pure OTF fonts in InDesign…

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.

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?

Surprisingly, JavaScript offers no easy way to alphabetize words in relevant order. Although the Array.sort() method is known to perform, by default, a lexicographical sort, you will find very quickly that the result is wrong in most real-life situations. Actually, the internal mechanism of JS sorting is confined to compare Unicode characters by their code points, so 'Z' (U+005A) comes before 'e' (U+0065), which itself comes before 'ç' (U+00E7), etc. Also, you have all noted with vexation that InDesign does not offer any alphabetical sort feature! Here is an experimental tool to help restore order in Latin alphabets.