Thanks David.

It was actually the second surprise of the day. I was delighted to receive a jacket file set up as a 5-page spread; front, back, spine, and flaps. Doubly so when the updated printer specs indicated a change to the spine width. That is why I was using the Page Tool at the time of my “discovery.”

And the (U.S.) designer had even worked in centimeters as laid out in the printer's template. Will wonders never cease?

Perhaps this isn't such a conundrum after all. Whether it's elegant or not is in the eye of the beholder. As I was trying to figure out how to edit a Jongware script–more about that shortly–I realized I had the cart before the horse.

Instead of providing reluctant designers FPO images with FPO watermark layer visible, provide the FPOs with the watermark hiding and provide them with the tool to make it visible at the appropriate time. They can do their design work and create approval PDFs/proofs without the watermark visible. When it comes time to pass the job off to production, run a script to make the watermarks visible.

Of course I'm relying on the designer to run the script, but that's as much as I can do.

The script: After far too many Google searches, I finally hit upon the right combination of search words and located a Object Layers Options script on, of all places, the InDesignSecrets.com website. Imagine that. Mr. Blatner, clearly you're a busy gentleman with a lot on your plate or you would have remembered that Mr. de Jong wrote the script for you just a little over a year ago. https://creativepro.com/for…..-scripting

I needed only to make the necessary fix noted in the thread and change two lines, one of which wasn't strictly necessary.

The line that reads
var layernames = [ “English”, “French”, “Dutch”, Russian ];
I changed to
var layernames = [ Watermark_ProFPO ];
to accomodate my single, hidden layer name

I also changed
staticTexts.add ({staticLabel:”Check to show, uncheck to hide”});
to
staticTexts.add ({staticLabel:”Check to show, leave unchecked to hide”});
but that's clearly a case of semantics

So, now it's time to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

David, mchak, thanks for the input.

oops… forgot to thank someone for continuing to share their wonderful scripting abilities with so many. Thank you Theunis.

And I hope I haven't used too many American idioms for the audience at large. ;D

Bob

@mchak

I understand your suggestions, but I never see most of the InDesign documents for which I'm creating FPOs. The designers could be in Chicago, New York, LA, or elsewhere. The production people could be U.S., Hong Kong, Italy, or elsewhere.

So, even if I could come up with a script to pass along to the designers so that would they be able to use FPOs with visible markings yet print or export without them, I can't even guarantee that they would use it–although, ahem, not providing unmarked FPOs might be the little nudge needed. ;D

re: Designers. I do have a degree in design and some background in same, but I've spent most of my professional life in the production trenches, so I feel your pain.

Bob

Is the post you refer to? https://forums.adobe.com/thread…..7?tstart=0

After reading it, I'm a bit unclear as to whether the visibility of PSDs with LayerComps can be scripted at all. My current FPO workflow doesn't actually use Photoshop's LayerComps feature, but once I began my quest for a solution, that possibility piqued my interest.

I did install the tryout for DTP Tools Layer Comps plug-in, and it would do the job for some workflows, but for my purposes it has problems:

1) The visibility options for each PSD would need to be set individually, i.e., no global find/change, and 2) I cannot force a customer to purchase a plug-in.

I did try editing the InDesign's standard Select Objects script to find only PSDs. Unfortunately, my understanding of scripts is marginal at best, and I just used Find/Replace to substitute the PDF variables with PSD. I didn't get any errors, and PSD was listed in the search dialog, but it didn't select any files either. Even if it had worked, we're back to the problem of Object Layer Options not working with multiple selections. The need for “looping” through the images is mentioned in the forum post.

Perhaps I'm tilting at windmills.

What, we have all these wonderful, intelligent, creative InDesignSecrets members and no ideas?

Yeah, I wasn't coming up with anything either.

Let's alter course and take a “something's better than nothing” approach and put aside any potential problems for now.

So the next question is for the scripters (I'll link this post to the InDesign Add-ons forum): Is it even possible to create a script that executes a global search for PSD files within INDD files and then hides or shows layers (Object Layer Options…) with a unique and constant name?

Thanks, Bob