Comments on: Freeze Composition

By: InDesignSecrets » Blog Archive » InDesignSecrets Podcast 116

InDesignSecrets » Blog Archive » InDesignSecrets Podcast 116 — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:04:34 +0000

[...] script (right-click and choose Save Link As) > Harbs’ blog post and link to his Freeze Composition script > Kasyans’ blog post and link to his CompareTwoDocuments script > Kasyans’ [...]

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:33:40 +0000

thanks … testing it now.

By: Harbs

Harbs — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:19:30 +0000

Okay.

I changed the script to insert a hard hyphen to replace the soft hyphens. You should now see no change in the text in those situations.

And, yes feel free to write about it on ID Secrets.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:10:19 +0000

Okay … I tried the new one, and yes *please* adjust the script (if it’s not too difficult) to add a hard hyphen and a line break when it detects an autohyphen. When I ran this version, it created a line in the middle of my sample paragraph that looked like a freak of nature! LOL The line was scaled, squeezed, jammed in there … though none of formatting fields indicated anything was wrong. If I replaced the soft hyphen with a hard hyphen and ran the script again, everything was fine.

Thanks for tweaking this! I know you just did it quickly, but like I said, I think it’d be really useful for many folks. (If it works out, can I write about it on IDSecrets?)

By: Harbs

Harbs — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:00:38 +0000

Hi Anne Marie,

Good catch. The script was a quick-and-dirty one…

I’ve improved the script to check for existing line breaks, and skip those lines.

I’ve also added checking for hyphenated words, and it’ll skip any lines which end in hyphenated words as well. This will very often not keep the appearance on those lines. The other possibility would be to insert a dash at the end of such lines instead.

Which way is better? Maybe an option for both?

Either way, the new version is available form the same download location.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:19:27 +0000

Harbs, I tried running your script on a few sample paragraphs and found that in certain cases it adds empty lines. I think it’s because it adds a line break even to lines that already have a line break.

I actually have a few clients that would rejoice at such a script as this for certain problem children projects. Would it be too much work to tweak the script so it wouldn’t add double line breaks?

Thanks

By: Harbs

Harbs — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:14:06 +0000

Yes. If the sole purpose was to compare the composition of two documents, that would be a good way of doing it. This is more of a multi-purpose hack to freeze the composition once you know it shouldn’t change.
I wrote this after hearing one time too many that there’s another program (which will remain nameless) “which is so much better” because it freezes the text composition…

By: Zev

Zev — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:03:03 +0000

Whoa, this is drastic! Wouldn’t a script that would compare the documents in the two versions of InDesign be better? For example have the user run one script in CS3 that would write a file of the last word of every page or every frame of every page and then open the file in CS4 and the user would run a script that would compare the file that was written from the CS3 script with the CS4 document?