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Posts Tagged ‘InDesign’

Zoom to Width Script

Posted by: on: January 4th, 2011 | 3 Comments

While editing content in InDesign, it can sometimes be very frustrating when content moves out of view. Also, it’s sometimes very convenient to be able to zoom in as close as you can to an object which might be an arbitrary zoom factor. While text is selected, it can be even more frustrating, because it centers the currently selected text rather than the text frame that the text sits in. All too soon, the text moves out of view… :(

We’ve felt these frustrations, and decided to do a little something about it!

This script serves one function: It zooms to the width of the currently selected object, or the text frame which selected text resides in. Just asign a keyboard shortcut to the script, and your frustrations will be greatly reduced!

Download the script from here.

Show Paragraph Based-on Script

Posted by: on: January 3rd, 2011 | 2 Comments

If you ever received a complex document from an unknown source, you know how difficult it can be deciphering the logic (or lack there-of) used to set the document up. When set up correctly, the structure of styles’ based-on dependencies are a tremendously powerful tool for controlling the attributes of text, but trying to figure out how styles interrelate can be very difficult.

There is no way to see which styles are based on which other styles other than opening up each style and examining the based-on selection. This script was created to help discover how styles relate to one another.

Download the script from here.

When the script is launched, it pops up this simple dialog which allows easy browsing of the based-on structure:
Based on Structure

Show Hyphenations Script

Posted by: on: January 2nd, 2011 | 1 Comment

Good book publishing is all about the details. One aspect of those details is fine-tuning how words break across lines. InDesign gives very good hyphenation control, but sometimes there is no replacement for the trained human eye.

This script simply makes it easy to find hyphenated words and decide how they should be handled. The script searches the text of your curent story and stops by the next hyphenated word and selects it.

Download the script from here.

For more great hyphenations scripts, be sure to check out Peter Kahrel’s collection here.

History Scripts

Posted by: on: December 29th, 2010 | No Comments

InDesign offers incredible undo support. The number of undos available in InDesign are virtually limitless! However, it can be very tedious to undo multiple times. It’s also error-prone because you can undo too much by mistake if you are doing it many times in quick succession.

While there are other products out there which offer multiple undo in different ways, we have found these simple scripts to be very useful.

The History Scripts can be downloaded from here.

Using the Scripts:

Included are two separate scripts. One is for undo, and the other is for redo. The both pop up similar dialogs which allow stepping forward or backwards through the undo or redo stack. You can select which point you’d like to go to in the stack by name from a simple drop-down dialog:
Undo History Redo History

You can even use keyboard navigation to open the drop-down and select the correct history position to revert to.
Undo History Menu Redo History Menu

Installation:

When installing these scripts you must copy the folder which contains the scripts in its entirety to the script panel folder. There should be three files in the folder as shown:
History Scripts Folder

Keyboard Shortcuts (Effective Use):

A particularly effective way of using these scripts is by assigning keyboard shortcuts to them to access the dialogs very easily. You might even want to assign the default undo and redo shortcuts.

Separate Pages Script

Posted by: on: December 27th, 2010 | 1 Comment

When publishing books with facing pages and bleeds, there is sometimes where you’ll need pages to have an inner bleed, but you don’t want pages to bleed onto one another (because they might have different images. One particularly blatant example of this is when publishing spiral bound books.

This situation is a bit of a pain to set up correctly in InDesign, and there has been numerous discussions on various forums how to deal with this problem. One such discussion took place on InDesign Secrets some years back.

We wrote a script back then to deal with this problem, and the script has been quite popular for many years. You can download the script from here.

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