Happy New 2023
Three years of mourning the death of a loved one; two-plus years digging into research while helping others get published, and praying. I can’t change what happened. I can only change how I react to the changes. Even InDesign changed. And so we roll with the changes. For those who purchased my books and find […]
Breaking Text Frames
One of the great scripts provided with InDesign is BreakFrame. In a nutshell, it is designed to break the thread between selected text frames. It first checks to make sure there are text frames or text items selected. If at least one text frame or item is in the selection list, it passes the list […]
AUTOMATOR I
I promised a discussion of Automator “next week” two weeks ago. Life happens! So why was I interested in Automator anyway? It was one of those “jump in and get it done” days. I had a script that would automate a workflow process that I did repeatedly: get files from a chosen folder and place […]
New Year New Post
We are well into a new year and it looks as if there may be some changes ahead that may affect some of us. There will be new challenges, new capabilities, and perhaps a new focus for some adventurous scripters. “There is nothing as consistent as change” so they say. Recently I read a paper entitled […]
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what days the Twelve Days of Christmas start on–and even why there is such a thing as the Twelve Days of Christmas. Some say that the earliest Christians celebrated January 6 as the birthday of the Christ child and that it wasn’t until over three […]
XML MULTIPLE ITEMS ON MULTIPLE PAGES
XML FROM 1 TO MANY PAGES The key to working with XML for a multiple page project is to start with a document having a Primary Text Frame. Instead of building page elements for XML on the first page of the document, the master page is used. Let’s see how this works. We will first […]
DIVIDEIT: OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Divide It: Old is New Again Many times when revisiting a script that you may have written awhile ago, you may wonder why you decided to use the logic that you did. That’s the beauty of working with InDesign: There’s so many different ways you can solve a problem. One script that I have considered […]
PARAGRAPH STYLES ON STEROIDS
PARAGRAPH STYLES ON STEROIDS One of the advantages of using paragraph styles is that you can link them together using the Next style designation. For instance, the following story begins with a headline, followed by a byline, then a first paragraph with a drop cap. The rest of the story is styled using a style […]
SPLITTING DATA MERGE DOCUMENT
SPLITTING MERGED DATA PDFS While on the subject of using Excel as a data source for InDesign, there is an interesting automation that involves Acrobat. This has to do with Acrobat’s unique feature that allows a single PDF to be split into individual files based on document parameters. One, parameter in particular is to use […]
XML MULTIPLE ITEMS ON MULTIPLE PAGES
XML FROM 1 TO MANY PAGES The key to working with XML for a multiple page project is to start with a document having a Primary Text Frame. Instead of building page elements for XML on the first page of the document, the master page is used. Let’s see how this works. We will first […]