AUTOMATE TEXT PLACEMENT
AUTOMATE TEXT PLACEMENT On InDesign’s Scripting forum is not uncommon to get a request for a script that has something to do with placing text and images. A recent request states in part: I have a number of sentences that I want to distribute to pages, one text frame per page, one sentence per text […]
WORKING WITH TABS
WORKING WITH TABS When looking for samples of code don’t overlook the scripts provided by Adobe in the InDesign’s Scripts. Recently I had occasion to look at their TabUtilities script when working on one that involved tabs. The TabUtilities script includes a number of examples for creating a tab stop using properties for position, alignment, […]
READING FILES AS LISTS, DEEPER DIVE
Reading Files As Lists, Deeper Dive In previous blog posts we spent a fair amount of time working with reading and writing files, and for good reason. A text file, a tab/return (.tsv), or comma/return (.csv) file can serve as the core source of information for an automation workflow. READING A FILE AS CLASS A […]
MANAGING HANDLERS AND TEMPLATES
HANDLERS AND TEMPLATES When writing a script it is best to break the process down into a number of discrete steps (modules). This way you can create and test each step separately. Once tested, the modules can be brought into a script as handlers. Moreover, these handlers can be reused over and over to reduce […]
WRITING TO TEXT FILES
READING AND WRITING TEXT FILES Previous blog posts have shown how a plain text file can be used as part of a workflow for importing images or text into InDesign. Writing and reading text files can be useful for a number of other automation issues. One workflow might use a plain text file to write […]
AUTOMATE PLACING IMAGES _ NAMING CONVENTION
AUTOMATE DOCUMENT IMAGE PLACEMENT Previous posts demonstrate how we can use a text file to provide information for creating a grid of images with and without a caption. But what if you want to set up a document template that does not require a grid of images. Instead you would like to have placeholders for […]
AUTOMATE PLACING IMAGES – GRID II
AUTOMATE PLACEMENT OF IMAGES WITH CAPTION The script created in our previous blog post demonstrated how a script could be used to automate the placement of images in a document grid. The file names for the images were read from a plain text file as a list that was parsed to place the images. As […]
AUTOMATE PLACING IMAGES – GRID
AUTOMATE PLACING IMAGES Placing and positioning multiple files in an InDesign document one at a time can be a tedious and time-consuming process. There are a number of workflows that can be used to automate this process. With this post we will start a series that will explore some of these which, of course, involve […]
READ TEXT FILE AS LIST
READING TEXT FILES AS LISTS To finish off our discussion series on working with lists, this post focuses on lists created and used when reading delimited text files. Along the way we will get a brief look at finding and replacing text in Adobe InDesign. Read Delimited Text File Lets say we have a plain […]
LISTS II
In this post we will look at some of the issues surrounding working with lists. Knowing the ins and outs of lists is paramont when writing scripts to automate Adobe InDesign. For instance the following will return a list of the rectangles found on a page: tell application “Adobe InDesign CC 2019” tell page 1 […]