Your Script Doctor

CREATING A KEYBOARD SHORTCUT

In this week’s blog post we take a step backward to review creating a keyboard shortcut to launch a script.

If you want to follow along with this post you will want the script that we created in our previous blog post: Web Document from Preset. You can get the script from our Feature page. If you don’t want to download the script, you can use the code below that is a cutdown version. This script does no more than create a web document from a document preset that has web intent (no added automation; no custom dialog.)

Web Doc From Preset_Simple

--assumes a preset having web intent exists
set userPrompt to "Choose Preset for creating a web document"
tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2018"
   set presetList to name of document presets where intent is web intent
   try
	set userChoice to my getChoice(presetList, userPrompt)
	set docRef to make document with properties {document preset:userChoice}
   on error errStr
	activate
	display alert ("Error: " & errStr)
   end try
end tell
userChoice
on getChoice(choiceList, userPrompt)
   set userChoice to choose from list choiceList with prompt userPrompt
   if userChoice = false then
	error "User Cancelled"
   else
	return item 1 of userChoice
   end if
end getChoice

PUT YOUR SCRIPT TO WORK

Now that you have a script, put it to work using a keyboard shortcut. The steps for this will be as follows:

• Place the script in one of InDesign’s predetermined script library folders
• Create a Keyboard Shortcut to launch the script
• Launch the Script using the Keyboard Shortcut

Script Library Folders

InDesign has two locations for saving scripts, the Application folder and the User’s folder. To see where these folders are located:

1. Open the Scripts Panel
   If the Scripts panel is not listed in the panel listing to the right of your window, open it from the Window menu (Window > Utilities > Scripts)