Indiscripts

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…

For the time being, neither IndexMatic nor BookBarcode is supposed to properly work in InDesign CC. New releases are being implemented, but this takes much more time than expected. Anyway a few weeks ago Eddy Van Hoeke from Scriptopedia found an amazing trick that makes both iX² and bB virtually compatible with the latest InDesign versions. And it boils down to one instruction…

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.

Skinning a user interface with ScriptUI may be tricky as soon as you want to apply custom fonts to specific fields or controls. Besides the ScriptUI object model does not offer intuitive solutions to that purpose, we also have to cope with a few cross-platform issues…

A “ghost item” is an anchored / inline page item (text frame, spline item, etc.) which is temporarily hidden because its parent character is in an overset area:

In April 2009, Thomas Silkjær reported a bug on app.doScript that alters the ‘undo’ feature in InDesign. Although this issue has been fixed in CS5, there are still some pitfalls to beware of when you want to speed up your script through fastEntireScript…

Non sans témérité, Stéphane Baril et David Deraedt nous ont récemment accueillis sur le plateau de Chips & Tips, la célèbre série d'Adobe TV dédiée à la diététique productivité. Au détour de cet épisode, Loïc Aigon et votre serviteur proposons une sorte de préambule aux techniques d'automatisation et de scripting dans la Creative Suite, avec quelques illustrations simples et directement accessibles aux néophytes. Vous y découvrirez notamment la version embryonnaire du script SwapItems utilisé pour permuter des objets dans une maquette InDesign…

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.

Every collection in the scope of the InDesign Scripting DOM provides a method called everyItem. It remained undocumented until InDesign CS3, but scripting experts such as Dave Saunders had already pointed out its forcefulness and already knew how to exploit it. Here are some details about this esoteric syntax.