It may not even be necessary. Print a color PDF to a black-and-white printer — what happens to the colored objects?

Nothing you can do about that. “Drop Caps” only work with a preset number of characters — unlike nested styles and such, which can react to something in the text.

Either adjust the number of characters manually per paragraph, or make loads of drop cap styles, each one with a different number of characters.

Would a small Javascript help you out? (A bit?) As in

par = app.selection[0].paragraphs[0];
spacePos = par.contents.indexOf(“u00a0”);
if (spacePos == -1)
alert (“There is no Hard Space in this paragraph!!”);
else
par.dropCapCharacters = spacePos;

(Ed.) Only one backslash in that script and it got eaten! Added again.

(Ed. again) And it got et again. If you see two backslashes (or five, if I can't restrain myself): there should be only one.

Anchored objects as in “Insert anchored object” and pasting a graphic line in there? (Which I couldn't make ID do, for some reason.)

Or do you mean the graphic lines are pasted in-line?

The problem with the first approach is the lines are inside another object (the anchored object), so you'd have to dig “one level” deeper. I didn't investigate that any further.

The other approach is no problem at all. A search for “^a” (Anchored Object, yessir) will return an array of all lines — and probably other inline stuff as well, but that's no problem. Each found item will have a property “graphicLines”, and if its length equals “1”, you have found an object consisting of one line. You could even check a bit further to assure the y coordinates of its start and end point are equal — if not, it's a slanted line instead ;-)

When you have a handle to the coordinates of the line, you can calculate the length of the line. It'll be in your local measurement units but that's not a problem. Remove the line, get the cursor position and add the length to it; then insert underscores until you have reached this target position (or about — it'll not be exact!).

You can also add underscores with an alternative method: clear all tabs between the start and end point, set a right aligned tab stop at the end and set the underscore as its dot leader. Then insert 1 tab. It'll also not be exact — ID rounds the number of underscores down, in whole underscore widths.

A final (and exact!) method is to add the tab stop and tab as above but not use a leader — underline the tab, and you're done.

Just in case you have to do a fresh re-install of InDesign (or your entire system)? Yeah — (that reminds me …)

* Plugins: no, except those you installed from third parties. (But these ought to be re-installable from their original medium. Of course it's anyones guess where their private settings are stored! You'd have to ask the supplier. Where are my high scores from Tetris stored?)

* Scripts: no (for the “Application scripts”) and yes (for all “User scripts”, which you may have written yourself, or downloaded and put in there). That's everything in the folder “(your name)/Library/Preferences/..” and then some, depending on your ID version, for Mac, and some entirely other place (too long to remember…) for Windows.

* Preferences: Yes!

* You forgot: Print and PDF Presets: Yes!

The first post here: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/526990 outlines the procedure for backing up your prefs and presets on both platforms.

I think there are two types of InDesign files.

A template opens by default as an Untitled copy; a regular file opens by default as 'original'.

What's the difference between a template and a regular document? The file extension. If you change it outside of ID, ID will not handle it anything special other than doing its default action on opening.

Why do I keep saying “by default”? Well … Press Ctrl(/Cmd)+O to open a file. If the file type is “All Readable Files”, you will see both templates and normal files. At the bottom of that dialog, you see “Open As”, with the radio button “Normal” checked — that's so ID will do the default action, depending on the file extension.

If you want to open a copy of a regular file, choose “Copy”; if you want to open a template for editing, choose “Original”.

You need to add quotes around the actual script name. I'm not totally sure it works with an Applescript either … I only link Javascripts together. (Anyone else? Help?)

app.doScript (app.activeScript.path+“/FindChangeByList.applescript“);

(Besides, you would need to make sure the applescript is in the same folder as the script you are running — because that's what the “app.activeScript.path” path points to!)

Sure there is. You can use one script to run other scripts from, with the command 'doScript'.

You will have to experiment a bit, because sometimes scripts need specific starting circumstances — mine needs the cursor to be in the first line of text to check, and when it's done the cursor is on the last line it checked. Other scripts may need the cursor to be somewhere else, or nowhere, or have a frame selected (and so on) …

If you find yourself clicking several scripts in a row without doing anything else (that included repositioning the cursor!), you can safely chain them to run in sequence using just one script.

The framework script should contain this line for each script to run:

app.docScript (app.activeScript.path+'/yourScriptName.jsx');

The path stuff is because 'doScript' needs the exact run time path of the script that it's going to run — typically, that'd be the Scripts folder in your personal User data folder. Fortunately, you don't even have to type it in, because the “active” script — the one that is running — can ask “whence it was run from” (the activeScript.path property), and if all your scripts are in the same folder, you only have to tack on the name of the script to run.

.. they had to uncheck 'overprint preview' in acrobat to create the postscript and the plates ..

How extremely odd.

“Overprint preview” is a screen-only function. Checking and unchecking this will draw a certain PDF using different algorithms, but the PDF itself *will not be changed*. It certainly should have *no influence at all* on how a document is printed — that should be the same, no matter what the preview looks like.

(Unless these printers have very unusual procedures, like using the Print Screen button to produce their plates.)