Oz Creative Pro

January 24, 2006

Ecksemell revisited

The last time I blogged about XML it was rightly pointed out that the XML information on the Adobe website was looking a little long in the tooth. That has now been rectified. There is now details such as a new technical reference on XML in InDesign CS2 and XML use in the real world. Well worth having a look at!

Regards Steve

Many Happenings

A lot has been happening since my last blog entry. Adobe, as I am sure you are aware, have completed our acquisition of Macromedia. Now we have so much more to learn! I have to get up to speed with new technologies such as Breeze and Flex. My vocabulary is quickly gaining a whole new set of acronyms, not the least of which is RIA (Rich Internet Applications). If you haven't yet heard the term I am sure you will be hearing it a lot more! Andrew Muller has posted on his blog a number of interesting links to RIA web sites.

I was excited to see the release of The Production Studio last week. This release is excellent in many ways but for me the most amazing feature is Adobe Dynamic Link. With Dynamic Link you can now drag an After Effects 7.0 composition unrendered directly into Premiere Pro 2 and Encore DVD 2.0. Any changes to the After Effects composition are automatically updated in Premiere or Encore, amazing!

This week we have the launch of Acrobat 3D which allows users to publish from CAD applications with the secure collaborative capabilities of Acrobat.

So much more to talk about!

Regards Steve

January 03, 2006

A little more scripting

I would like to return to scripting InDesign (a favourite topic!). Scripting InDesign is a perfect way to avoid repetitive tasks. A common request from users is a way to print individual pages to PDF or EPS from InDesign. The new InDesign CS2 scripting guide has these useful scripts and far more!

I have recently been showing automation tasks for quick layouts for pages including a javascript for taking XMP Metadata attached to images and using this in a layout. Basically this involves InDesign reading the Metadata for a selected image, taking this and placing it in a text frame and formatting it with an object style automatically formatting the text... nice!

For those interested in playing with this, the script is below. This text can be copied into any text editor and saved as a text file with a file extension .jsx into the Applications > InDesign CS2 > Presets > Scripts folder. To run select and image and double click the script from the scripts palette (Windows > Automation > scripts).

if(app.documents.length != 0){
if(app.selection.length != 0){
if(app.selection[0].graphics.length != 0){
var myFrame = app.selection[0];
var myBounds = myFrame.geometricBounds;
var myX1 = myBounds[1];
var myY1 = myBounds[2];
var myX2 = myBounds[3];
var myY2 = myBounds[2]+10.5;
var myGraphic = app.selection[0].graphics.item(0);
var myLink = myGraphic.itemLink;
var myLinkXMP = myLink.linkXmp;
try{
var myAuthor = myLinkXMP.author;
var myTitle = myLinkXMP.documentTitle;
var myDescription = myLinkXMP.description;
var myTextFrame = myGraphic.parent.parent.textFrames.add(undefined,
undefined, undefined, {geometricBounds:[myY1, myX1, myY2, myX2],
contents:myAuthor + '\r' + myDescription});
myTextFrame.textWrapPreferences.textWrapType = TextWrapTypes.contour;
//this assumes an object style named Picture Caption
myTextFrame.applyObjectStyle(app.activeDocument.objectStyles.item("Picture Caption"), true);
}
catch (myError){
alert("Graphic does not contain the requested XMP information.");
}
}
}
}

Steve