Indiscripts

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.

The jsxbin format (“Binary JavaScript”) is a boon for developers because it enables them to distribute a script without exposing its precious code. The ExtendScript ToolKit (ESTK) offers an Export to Binary feature which instantly converts a human-readable js(x) file into jsxbin. InDesign can then interpret this file as if it were a pure JavaScript. The only (boring!) problem is that the encoded script is not allowed to load a persistent session through the #targetengine directive. Here is a secret trick to bypass this limitation with a single encrypted file.

As illustrated by the YALT technique, it's easy —and powerful!— to let a script read its own bytes while it is running. We could even go further and get a script to update itself to achieve some advanced functionalities.

Sometimes you just need to test a short snippet without having to create and install a complete script. Suppose you want to check some object properties, or to evaluate a simple JavaScript expression. It is easy to write and interprete your instructions from the ExtendScript Toolkit, but it would be even faster to do the whole job from the InDesign user interface.