Basic Script Installation and Use

To see a video tutorial for installing these scripts—or any others—view Mike Rankin’s “InDesign How-To: Install a Script” on the CreativePro YouTube channel.

To learn about using the sample scripts that InDesign installs automatically, visit the ”Automate Workflows with Scripts” page on the Adobe Help site.

Downloading and installing scripts

To download a script from this site, right-click the Show script or Download script link at the foot of the script’s description page, and choose Save Link As to place the script in the script folder (locations are given below).

Files that you downloaded which have the extension .jsx are ready to be run. Some scripts, however, are zipped. When you unzip these .zip files, you either get a file with the extension .jsxbin (treat these as if they were .jsx files) or a number of .jsx files. Place them in the Scripts folder.

If the file you downloaded has a .txt extension, remove it and add the .jsxextension if necessary.

The Scripts folder

Where you store your Javascripts depends on your operating system and platform. The easiest way to find out where your scripts are is as follows. In InDesign, open the Scripts panel (Window > Utilities > Scripts).

You can use either the Application folder or the User folder (the Community folder was introduced in InDesign 2020). Scripts in the Application folder can be run by all users, those in User only by the current user. Anyway, click the folder that you want to use and in the fly-out pick Reveal in Explorer(PC) or Reveal in Finder (Mac).

In the window that opens now, click on the folder Scripts Panel. This is the folder where you should store your scripts.

Running a script

In InDesign, you run a script from the Script panel (Window > Utilities > Scripts). Look for the script’s name in the panel and double-click it. This goes for .jsx scripts and for .jsxbin scripts. When you use a script a lot or when you have many scripts, the Scripts panel gets awkward, and you can try other ways to run a script:

1. Use Quick Apply (press Ctrl+Enter on Windows, Command+Return on the Mac), type s: and any part of a script’s name) to highlight a script, then press Enter.
2. My preferred way of running scripts: use the script launcher. It’s a replacement for InDesign’s Scripts panel.
3. Assign a script to a keyboard shortcut.

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