Your Script Doctor

Chances are, even with all your preparation, you may get the Missing Fonts dialog when you import. You could have your script disable this dialog, but it is a good idea to take note of what is reported missing. Close the dialog if the missing fonts are not part of the original Google Doc styles. You will probably need to do some tweaking in the document as users hardly ever get it one hundred percent right. Besides things like tables and tabbed columns will definitely require some additional work.

Create Chapters

Since the document I had to work with was one long text flow, I decided to import one long document into InDesign and let a script cut the resulting document into chapters after import. This was a fairly easy script to write since the first line of every chapter was set in a unique paragraph style (Title).
The script first searched for each occurrence of the Title paragraph style in the document. This produced a list of text index references from back of the document forward. Then, within a repeat loop the list was parsed:

1. The text between the chapter markers was cut
2. a new InDesign document was created from the book template
3. the cut text was placed in the new document
4. the new document was saved to the same folder as the original document using the chapter title as its name

NOW FOR THE IMAGES

The next challenge was to place the images.

The one step that is absolutely necessary for this workflow is to resample and/or resize images to fit the document’s criteria. Because I wanted to optimize the image quality as part of this step, I left this as pretty much a manual method. The images would be:

• No wider or taller than page margins would allow
• Resolution set to the final resolution required for the InDesign document.
• image files named to correspond to the name of the original image

You can make minor changes to image files once placed in the InDesign document, but for the most part, images should be page-ready when imported.

Now for the main reason for this blog: the script for placing the images.

IMAGE PLACEMENT SCRIPT

The major modules for this script were as follows:

Basic script setup – establish values for script. Variable values should be obtained from user with a custom dialog. Here they are just hard-coded.

set foundSet to {}
--minimum characters allowed to consider text a story
set minText to 1 
--arbitrary number to add to top margin for testing if image is at top of page
set topTest to 20 
--character style for image tags
set noPrintName to "NoPrint"
--objectStyles
set objStyleName to "ImageStyle"
set topObjName to "TopObjStyle"
--use paragraph style to align images horizontally
set paraAlignName to "AlignParagraph"
--will return list of stories from getStoryRef handler if set to true
set allowMultiple to false 

Choose Folder – Have the user choose the folder that contains the image files:

try
   set dPath to choose folder with prompt "Select folder for images to place"
   set folderPath to dPath as string
on error errStr
   --give the user a message and exit the script
end try

Document setup – Set application preferences and get document margins (right hand page)

tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2015"
   set measurement unit of script preferences to points
   set preserve bounds of image preferences to true
   set docRef to document 1
   tell margin preferences of docRef
      copy {top, right, bottom, left} to {py0, px0, py1, px1}
   end tell

Story reference – Get a reference to your story
Your Google document should be one story. For some reason when a Word document is placed in InDesign you may end up with more than one story. Only one of these stories will have any amount of text so our handler should be able take care of this.

Call to the handler:

set storyRef to getStoryRef (docRef, minText, allowMultiple)

(*Parses through list of stories to get those not on master spread
and whose length is greater than 1. 
If allowMultiple, a list is returned, otherwise item 1 of the test list is returned*)
on getStoryRef(docRef, minText, allowMultiple)
   tell application "Adobe InDesign CC 2015"
      set docRef to document 1
      set testList to {}
      set storyList to stories of docRef
      repeat with i from 1 to length of storyList
         try
            set storyRef to item i of storyList
            set testIt to text containers of storyRef
            set theTest to class of parent of parent page of item 1 of testIt
            if theTest is spread then
               set end of testList to theTest
           end if
        end try
      end repeat
      set lastTest to {}
      repeat with i from 1 to length of testList
         set storyLength to length of storyRef
         if storyLength > minText then
            set end of lastTest to storyRef
         end if
      end repeat
      if allowMultiple then
         return lastTest
      else
         return item 1 of lastTest
      end if
   end tell
end getStoryRef

For simplicity, the script assumes that allow multiple is false so only one story is returned from the handler. Otherwise you would need to repeat through the stories if a list of more than one is returned.

Image tag References – Get a list of references for the image tags in the document
You can use find grep to get this list. For this I used the following:

set find grep preferences to nothing
set change grep preferences to nothing
set find what of find grep preferences to "\\[image[0-9]*(\\.[a-z]+)\\]"
tell storyRef
   set foundSet to find grep with reverse order
end tell

Notice that the list is returned in reverse order. This is important. Any time a script relies on object indexes, always work the document in reverse order. Otherwise, indexes will change and you will most likely end up with a mess.

PLACE IMAGES

If the foundSet is greater than one (1), repeat through the set and place the images. At first I was going to delete the image tags after placing the images, but after a few trial and errors I decided to just change the color of the text to nothing. This way you can use the style attributes of the image placement tags to tweak the positioning of the image in relation to caption or text following.

Insertion Point – Establish Insertion Point for Placement

Use the index of the image tags to get a reference to the insertion point to use as the object for placing

repeat with j from 1 to length of foundSet
   try
      set testIt to item j of foundSet
      set applied character style of testIt to charStyleRef
      set insIdx to index of testIt
      set insertRef to insertion point (insIdx) of thisStory

Get the name of the file to place from the image tag

      set imageText to contents of testIt
      set textLength to length of imageText
      set fileName to text 2 thru -2 of imageText
      set filePath to folderPath & fileName

Place the image Have the insertion point defined above place the image

   tell insertRef
      set placedList to place file filePath
      set imageRef to item 1 of placedList
   end tell

Apply object styles – (you may have other tests you will want to add)

   set containerRef to parent of imageRef
   set applied object style of containerRef to objStyleRef
   if item 1 of geometric bounds of containerRef ≤ (py0 + topTest) then
      set applied object style of containerRef to topStyleRef
   else
      set applied object style of containerRef to objStyleRef
   end if