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October 10, 2005
Fear of Scripting
On the surface scripting applications such as InDesign and Photoshop sounds pretty scary. The thing that really turned me on to scripting and therefore overcome my fear, was a calendar script I came across on the Adobe Share Studio. The original (I believe) was created by Jan Suhr then adapted by Robert Cornelius. It automates the generation of a calendar using tables, character and paragraphs styles, for an excellent result. With InDesign CS came the ability to write a user interface to scripts. I went to work to add a front end dialog to this script, making it a little easier to use. With a few adaptions and a translation into JavaScript, to make it cross platform, this is great example for how scripting can avoid repetitive, boring tasks.
There is a wealth of information available regarding scripting Creative Suite applications such as InDesign. There are dedicated user forums for scripting the Creative Suite 2 applications.
I have seen some amazing uses of scripting including Shane Stanleys' AppleScript that would take all the Photoshop images in an InDesign document, crop, rotate (if necessary), resize, rename and replace, optimised for the layout. Brilliant!
InDesign CS2 now can access image Metadata via scripting - meaning metadata such as photographers name and photo caption can be retrieved from the image and placed into your layout.
The possibilities are endless.
Regards
Steve
Comments
Shane Stanley is the God of scripting; especially AppleScript.
He can convert 5 lines of verbosity into 1 line of Applescript haiku!
The scripting resources mentioned above are excellent; and the scripting guide (a PDF hidden on your install CD) is a great introduction to scripting.
If you're getting bored next weekend, start to learn scripting. Learning new languages is a Good Thing to keep your brain cells going!
At the upcoming AppleScript Pro Sessions in Chicago (Oct 31-Nov 4) Shane and Ray will be devoting a full day to teaching users how to script InDesign CS/CS2. In fact more than a day, since they cover it along with other Suite programs during another day of the 5-day workshop.
A full breakdown of what they'll be covering every day, along with a link to the registration form, is here:
http://www.scriptingmatters.com/aspro.php
I know a number of my local InDesign/InCopy clients will be going (I'm in Chicago).
I think Ray and Shane's training is unique in that they spend a lot of time teaching how to use AS to automating publishing/design tasks and workflows, in addition to general OS X automation. That's so hard to find.
I've seen that InDesign/Photoshop script, amazing. On their site (URL above) there's another amazing one ... something like taking data from a MySQL dbase and creating Illustrator tables on the fly, then placing those tables in ID to create a catalog or something, all automated ... boggles the mind.
AM
It would be interesting to note that I fed the idea of a resizing script to Shane Stanley over 2 years ago, with a full spec, which he quoted a price to do. So in that sense, he has taken my idea and actually made a script. Thanks Shane, but you can't take the credit for something you didn't think of without mentioning the person who thought of the idea. That's a bit naughty.
I suppose we'd all like to think we thought of something first, but the script Steve saw was a port of a script I wrote and used in QuarkXPress some time in the 90s. And that, in turn, was probably based on similar scripts written by others; there were several around (it's an obvious thing to automate, I think), and I think I might have added the rotation bit. That's what happens with scripting: lots of people often end up doing similar things.
I didn't release the script because I never finished it to my satisfaction (there are serious runaround issues to deal with in InDesign; the Quark version basically ignored them). But I think a group of scripters have ironed most of the issues out; anyone interested can probably track it down in the InDesign Scripting User to User Forum.
Sorry you felt a bit overlooked, Fraser; I was a bit disappointed I never received a yes or no to the quote, too.