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 […]
EXCEL TO INDESIGN
EXCEL AS DATA FILE There has been an explosion of ways that Excel is being used for more than just a spreadsheet. One of the ways is to use it as a data resource for automating document creation. This is, in part, due to InDesign’s Data Merge feature. The power of this feature makes this […]
XML: ANOTHER APPROACH
ANOTHER APPROACH TO XML I often tell students that with power comes difficulty. True, the more power a program offers, the more difficult it becomes–the more there is to learn. So it is with using XML in InDesign. The previous blogs open the door; but to really cover the subject would require a fairly sizable […]
REPEAT TO THE RESCUE
REPEAT TO THE RESCUE Few are the scripts that can be written that don’t use a repeat loop. Imagine what writing a script would be without repeats: there would need to be a statement written for each item to be processed. The number of times statements are processed depends on the repeat. The most simple […]
MUCH USED HANDLERS
MUCH USED HANDLERS In our previous blog we started a script that creates a document prepared to receive XML import. Because it used a number of handlers, many of which can be used for a number of other scripts, it was our decision to leave these handlers for another post. This way we could do […]