Dave wrote:
How can I divide a graphic frame into equal parts… like making four equal squares inside a larger square?
I was absolutely, positively sure we covered this sometime over the last few years, but I must have been dreaming it because even google can’t find it. I’m shocked because I like to take partial credit for this feature existing. I was training some newspaper folks at a big paper a couple hours from here and they wanted to know how to make a grid of objects on their page. Back in the QX days, they used an XTension (from Visions Edge, I think) to convert any frame into a grid of objects. But now what were they to do?
I was stumped (sure, they could use Step and Repeat, but it’s not easy to figure out the math). But when I returned home I asked my co-author Olav Martin Kvern, and he wrote up a quick script for it. I emailed it to my client the next day and everyone was happy.
Fortunately for all of us, Ole is also the script guru on the InDesign team and he liked the script so much that he added it to the sample scripts that ship with the program. It’s called MakeGrid.jsx and it’s installed by default in CS3. (In CS2 you have to install it from the discs or find it on the Adobe Web site.) You can find the script by choosing Window > Automation > Scripts, then opening the Samples folder inside the Scripts folder.
Select any frame on you page, and when you double click the script, you’ll see this:
When you click OK, InDesign transforms the single frame into a bunch of frames!
Actually, technically, you can select even more than one frame before running the script and it’ll affect all of them. And, as you can probably tell from the above dialog box, you can even place the original content into the final frames. For example, here’s one big picture that is split into 100 smaller frames… then some of the frames were deleted:
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on September 1, 2008
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