Indiscripts

The global method parseInt(str,radix) has a critical bug in ExtendScript. When radix is greater than 10, some undesired characters can be mistakenly parsed as valid digits, which corrupts the output. This issue is solved in IdExtenso…

Six years! It tooks me six years to document the fundamentals of InDesign “Coordinate Spaces and Transformations.” You may think I am sluggishly slow—which is a sensible diagnosis!—but the topic required a true immersion to be both experimented and covered. Chapter 5 (“The Transform Process”) is now available and makes this version 3.1 consistent enough to form a kind of white paper…

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.

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…

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…

Computing Bézier curves that really look like sine waves is an exciting challenge for script developers. One needs to deal with both optimizing control points, transforming coordinate spaces and splitting curves. Here is a function that solves it all in ExtendScript for InDesign.

Exploring the prototypal relationships between basic ExtendScript's entities reveals an interesting network of hidden objects. The following diagram shows that ExtendScript's own implementation of JavaScript is deeply connected with a root function (referred to as [[Function]] in the figure) which provides the actual prototype—that is, the __proto__ property—of many visible objects, including Function and Object themselves…

A sprite usually refers to a primary image which is integrated in a larger scene. The term was popularized by Dave Shea in his 2004 article “CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death” which describes how to render the multiple states of a button or icon from a single composite image. I discovered that we can derive this technique to create attractive buttons in ScriptUI 4.0 and later…

Dealing with groups is a major headache for InDesign scripters. On one hand, the Group object has no injection method to offer, which makes difficult to append existing page items into a given group. On the other hand, although the Groups API exposes a promising add() method, nobody has ever managed to use this feature from any PageItem.groups area, so we seem doomed to perpetually rebuild groups from scratch.