That could definitely be done. You would just need to grab the “name” of each page so that you can use it to build the file path with.

I believe that the method for getting a page’s “name” is simply thisPage.name

The main thing that we are missing in Visual Studio is the object model viewer. Without that, you need to use clunky online alternatives that are hard to navigate (especially for beginners)

Great video David, very well done! You definitely took it further than I had been envisioning!

Well, I’ll be! It turns out that I had jumped to quickly to a scripted solution when there are indeed ways of doing this with a GREP find and replace… David, this is why you are the master!

I began by creating a paragraph style named “Person 1” and I applied some paragraph border and paragraph shading options until I was fairly happy with the look. When doing this yourself, you will want to make sure that you pay attention to the “Corner Size And Shape” options (I rounded them a bit), the “Offsets” options (I increased mine a bit) and the “Width” option (I set mine to “text” so that it didn’t span the entire frame). In Addition to the shading, I suggest using the “space before” and/or “space after” settings to create some space between each of the messages.

After I got the “Person 1” style set up more or less to my liking, I created a new “Person 2” style and based it on “Person 1” so that I only needed to change the color of the paragraph shading and the text justification and that style was done.

Now that the two styles were set up, it was time go get to the GREP. Here are the strings that I used:

In the GREP find field I entered: ^.+(Person 1).+$

And then I chose the “Person 1” paragraph style in the “Change Format” dialog, clicked “Change All” and presto! All of the Person 1 messages were now styled as messages. A quick rinse and repeat to target the “Person 2” messages and the formatting was done.

As far as placing images using text, I think that I posted a nice little script on InDesign Secrets as a response to a post a while back. I’ll see if I can dig it up!

Are you using multiple paragraph returns to space your paragraphs rather than using space before? If so, I have two things to say…

First, tsk, tsk… don’t do that!

Second, try this GREP: +(?=$)

Hello Jakob,

Something like this would not be possible via any native InDesign features that I am aware of but this is absolutely possible via scripting. This is more than I am willing to do for free but I would be more than happy to point you toward resources where you could learn about scripting or we could potentially work out some sort of agreement…

I will work on digging up some resources for you to look over, look for them in my next reply!

I worked for several years at a printing press that ran some fairly old web presses and I haven’t seen anything produced by Canva that would cause problems for that older printing system. I have sent countless ads to press that contained rasterized text at 300 dpi without issue…

My suggestion would be that if the printing company that you use can’t print these kinds of files cleanly then find yourself a new printer!

Here it is!

This script will open InDesign documents that you have selected in Finder, open them, resize pages, save and close documents.

Features:
• Dynamic movement of page objects to keep them aligned to the bottom margin.
• Works with unlimited number of documents.
• Works on unlimited number of pages per document.

Warning:
This script saves the document in place so all of the selected InDesign documents will be overwritten. I recommend creating a copy of your files prior to running the script.

————————————————————–
———————–BEGIN SCRIPT———————–
————————————————————–

(* set new dimensions for the pages that you will be batching *)
set newDocHeight to 48
set newDocWidth to 51

(* select all of the files that you would like to convert *)
tell application “Finder” to set theFiles to selection

repeat with currentFile in theFiles

(* opens each file in the default application – this will be whatever the latest version of InDesign is on your machine *)
tell application “Finder” to open currentFile

tell application “Adobe InDesign CC 2018”
(* repeat/try combo checks to see if the front document is open. As soon as the script can set the active document as a variable this repeat will be exited *)
repeat
try
set myDoc to active document
exit repeat
on error
delay 1
end try
end repeat

tell document preferences of myDoc
(* get current page dimensions *)
set startHeight to page height
set startWidth to page width
(* set page dimensions to our new dimensions *)
set page height to ((newDocHeight & “mm”) as string)
set page width to ((newDocWidth & “mm”) as string)
end tell

(* find the distance that the page items should be moved using the “roundThis” handler *)
set xMovement to my roundThis(((newDocWidth – startWidth) / 2), 4)
set yMovement to my roundThis(((newDocHeight – startHeight) / 2), 4)

set docPages to every page of myDoc

(* repeat through all pages in the document and move page items according to the math above *)
repeat with thisPage in docPages
move thisPage’s page items by {xMovement, yMovement}
end repeat –Doc pages

(* Save the document in place and close it *)
tell myDoc
save
close
end tell –myDoc
end tell –InDesign

end repeat –Repeat with currentFile in theFiles

(* handler for rounding decimal places *)
on roundThis(n, numDecimals)
set x to 10 ^ numDecimals
tell n * x to return (it div 0.5 – it div 1) / x
end roundThis