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Theunis De Jong
MemberI have written a Javascript to test, and it seems to work fine for basic elements — text and fill/stroke on object, applied through styles.
It does not work for items on a master page (you have to override these) and for bulleted lists (you have to convert these to text). It also doesn't work on table and cell styles, but theoretically that should be possible as well — I left it out for now because it's a bit more work ;-)
But it requires discipline in your document setup and style usage!
- First, you create swatches named “Page 1”, “Page 2”, “Page 3/4”, “Page 5/6/20”, and so on. The “x/y” notation lists multiple pages where the same swatch may be used — sorry, no niceties such as “Page 5-20” or “Page xxiv and xxvi up to the end” are allowed.
- You create one single swatch called “Color Placeholder”. Make it a bright “bad” color (I suggest Hot Pink) so it's clearly visible when applied.
- You apply this color only and exclusively through paragraph styles, character styles, and object styles. You cannot apply it directly to text or objects; that is because the applied color will get changed by the script, but the style color (“Color Placeholder”) will still be 'underneath'.
- If you run the script, it scans all paragraph, character, and object styles for a fill color “Color Placeholder”, and for object styles also a stroke color “Color Placeholder”. If it finds a style with that color in the definition, it finds all occurrences where that style was applied, checks on what page it occurs, and changes the color in place — leaving the style unchanged.
It's important that it changes the color “in place”, by directly changing the applied color. That's so you can run the script again, after inserting or removing pages, and editing text, and that's why you have to apply the color through styles.
It's also important that you actually define a swatch for every page — if the script cannot find a color for page x, all items on that page will remain in their original color (Hot Pink, or one that was assigned in a previous run).
You can download the test script by right-clicking here; select “Save Target As” (or equivalent) and save it right into your User Script folder. Don't forget to create the swatches and set up your styles before running!
September 10, 2010 at 2:55 pm in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize a Book to Turn On/Off Layers? #56977MemberMr. Screens, no need to leave it at that!
Try this script: layersPerBooks.jsx (right-click and select “Save Target As”, or equivalent, into your User Scripts folder. You might need to remove the .txt extension that some browsers automatically add.)
It works like this:
- First, it checks if you have one single Book file open. Due to an unfortunate mistake of Adobe's, one cannot trust ID to handle more than one Book at a time when scripting …
- Then it opens all of the individual documents from that book.
- It checks all layers of all documents, and builds a list of just the ones that occur in every book. That's just to make sure, because …
- then it displays a tiny dialog, where you can check on and off the individual layers! The initial setting is taken from the first document in the book, but you are free to check and uncheck all of them at will.
- It applies the changes to all documents, and then you can:
- Do nothing — the documents stay open, unsaved, on your screen. I'd recommend this when running it for the first time. I tested the script, of course, but please make sure it works as I am hoping it does.
- Save. All documents are saved when changed but stay opened on the screen.
- Save and Close. (No explanation needed, methinks.)
MemberNot necessarily. If you only need the text, you can click your text cursor anywhere into a running story and select “Export”, then select “Rich Text Export” in the “Format” drop down menu. Word can read RTF text as good (hum hum) as it can read its own files.
But it depends on what you are expecting … RTF export doesn't include any text or images that are in a frame of their own, and I'm not too sure about embedded images either. InDesign also has loads more text formatting options than Word does (oh — Word has “word underlining” … can't think of anything else that would be useful), and this formatting will get Lost in Translation, as will custom non-mapped glyphs, and — I think there was a question regarding that on the Adobe InDesign Forum — Word cannot handle large font families with more weights than “Regular” and “Bold”.
The Light Side, then, is both Paragraph and Character styles ought to translate to their Word counterparts, meaning, you can export to RTF, edit the text in Word using the same paragraph and character styles, then read back into ID and have your original style styling back. (Or so I've heard. I've never been tempted to try it — What Happens in InDesign, Stays in InDesign, is my credo. Well, one of them, anyway.)
MemberHeh heh. They are great innit?
It's no more than logical that there is some penalty gets added for lots of, or very complicated — or both :) — GREP styles. I guess I'm lucky because my larger books (> 600 pp) get divided into separate files per chapter, only being glued together with the Book function on final exports. That might lessen InDesign's burden a bit.
But it seems the GREP styles get processed as soon as you enter or change them; there is a delay, and then suddenly you see your text re-flow, highlight, format, and generally magically get transformed into smart text, and after that I haven't noticed (yet) any substantial extra delays on redrawing and editing the text.
As for a separate GREP section: well … I dunno. I really enjoy pointing people towards a GREP search/replace or GREP Style solution even if they ask something not immediately related to it. They wouldn't know to ask such a question in a hypothetical GREP forum if they hadn't already considered using it in the first place.
MemberUnfortunately it's completely beyond user control.
In recent Photoshops, you can select a preferred panel text size out of a set of not less than 3 (yeah three!) options, which I've nicknamed “Small”, “Smaller”, and “Useless”. Nevertheless — you have a choice …
Sadly, even though Adobe is now on “Creative Suite” number 5, even tiny useful little ideas like this are not propagated onto the other programs.
Complain, loudly and sincerely, to Adobe, using their Feature Request/Bug Report Form. When lots of small voices are shouting at the top of their lungs someone might just hear you.
September 10, 2010 at 5:34 am in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize a Book to Turn On/Off Layers? #56962MemberDavid, it can be scripted but only if all layer names across the entire book are the same. It needs some consideration — what if you hide all layers but one, and there is a document in the book without the one remaining visible layer?
(I realize a perfectly reasonable answer would be “Do what the user asked, then put the blame on him if it's not what he intended”.)
MemberThe 'upgrade' from CS2 to CS5 doesn't really upgrade the active installation, it's more like an automatic discount on the next purchase. You don't have to have CS2 (and CS3, and CS4 :) ) installed before you add CS5, it comes as a complete package.
You do need to have the serial number from that CS2 ready, so the installer will know you are using a valid upgrade.
(Read https://forums.adobe.com/message/2907349 for a similar question — the Eligibility Chart referred to by Peter Spier is at https://www.adobe.com/products/…..n/upgrade/)
MemberYeah, sorry — I accidentally left out what it was for. This is Javascript, which is something entirely different from Applescript; they might as well be two different languages. Oh wait — they are :p
The AppleScript Editor can only handle AppleScript; with the ESTK you can edit lots of different programming languages, but fortunately its default setting for new documents is … Javascript! (A lucky escape for me, there!)
I prefer Javascript over AppleScript — both scripting languages have their strengths, but Javascripts single huge advantage is the same script works on both Mac OS X and Windows versions of InDesign!
AppleScript, on the other hand, only works on OS X. I've said on a few occasions the third supported option, VBScript, has no good points at all – but that's just me. Anyway, VBS only works on Windows.
(Edit:)
.. saved it to my Indesign CS5 scripts folder, restarted Indesign ..
You don't have to do that! Next time you save a script into the Scripts folder and go back to InDesign, you will see it's already there, in the Scripts panel!
MemberDisabling Live Screen Redraw in the preferences should help you get going. I can't imagine what the developers were using — liquid nitrogen cooled octo-core systems with a terabyte of RAM, something like that?
Working in CS4, I also leave Live Spell Check and Autocorrect switches off (as all of my text comes from external sources), and Live Preflight too (since “Dead Preflight” would have been a better name).
Only when I'm finished working on a document I switch Live Preflight on, then go have a cup o' coffee, and come back to read … “No errors”. (At least, on the good days.)
MemberI wonder if this is enough:
app.activeDocument.colors.everyItem().properties = {space:ColorSpace.CMYK, model:ColorModel.PROCESS};Save a copy of your document before, and check everything after running!
September 6, 2010 at 3:22 pm in reply to: HELP! Automating text formatting and GREP questions #56935Member(The easiest way would be if someone can name a font where either character 'y', 'e', 's', 'Y', 'E', or 'S' looks like a check mark … Now that would make it totally automatic and transparent!)
September 6, 2010 at 3:19 pm in reply to: HELP! Automating text formatting and GREP questions #56934Member1. Basically, what Laurent said, but in a more expansive way:
* Apply default formatting to, say, “$” with 3 digits.
* Adjust font, size, and/or tracking for 2 digits. Then make this a character style named “Wide”.
* The same, for 4 digits. Make this a character style “Narrow”.
In the paragraph style for this text, add 2 GREP styles:
* Apply “Wide” to the text “$ddb”
* Apply “Narrow” to the text “$ddddb”
2. Short of replacing the text 'yes' with an image, as explained in the Adobe forum, no easy way.
You can search for 'yes', case sensitive and 'whole word', and replace it with the character ? — that's that tick mark from Zapf Dingbats. Insert it once in your document, using the Glyphs panel; then copy and paste it into the Replace field. Create a character style with the font Zapf Dingbats, and select that in the Replace With formatting field.
You could try this, and see if it works for you:
* Replace each occurrence of 'yes' with 'yes?'. Remember to select both 'case sensitive' and 'whole word' when replacing.)
* Add two more character styles: 'Checkmark Hide' (set the Horizontal width in Advanced Type to 1%, and the text color to [None]) and 'Checkmark Show' (have it only apply the font Zapf Dingbats).
* Add two more GREP styles to the paragraph style. Apply “Checkmark Hide” to this:
yes(?=?)
so the characters 'yes' followed by a checkmark are hidden.
* Apply 'Checkmark Show' to this
(?<=yes)?
so the correct font is applied to every checkmark which is preceded by the text 'yes'.
MemberYeah, that's exactly what I meant — although I shouldn't have said 'kerning', because you cannot get that (easily) into a Character Style. It's totally do-able with some negative tracking, though, and with the same net effect.
Apply a character style with a huge value (about -350) to the following
.(?=ddb)The tracking value depends on where you want the cents to line up, so first create and apply the style, then change the amount of tracking in the Character Style with Preview enabled.
Memberhttps://carijansen.com/2009/07/…..9/tip-091/ !
(I must admit I'm not sure about the 'above the comma' part — perhaps you need an additional GREP that applies a huge negative kern over a comma which has a digit to its left and no more than two at its right.)
MemberMy colleagues were suitably impressed when I showed them this one! They were equally amazed by the Place Multiple Images in a Grid option and the useful little popup menu when you right-click on the Cell Strokes selector …
So, David, this was a 'known trick'? Are you kidding — how many people knew this, then, and how many more are there? :)
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