How to Define a Plug-in

Wikipedia defines a plugin as “a set of software components that adds specific capabilities to a larger software application”. Not a bad definition.

Most software applications have very specific ways of adding functionality to the application, and this definition pretty much covers it. In InDesign, things get much more confusing, because it’s probably one of the most extensible commercial software applications in existence!

In the beginning of time (a few years back when InDesign was created), there were “plugins” and “scripts” — two very well defined concepts.

Plugins

Plugins were written in C++ using the same SDK and APIs that InDesign itself was created with. In fact, at least 90% of InDesign itself and almost all its features are implemented as plug-ins. Plug-ins are tightly integrated into the program, very efficient, and can work dynamically in the background. Plug-ins can have user interfaces which look like integral parts of the program.

Scripts

Scripts are implemented in one of the three supported scripting languages: ExtendScript (Adobe’s version of Javascript), Applescript (on Macintosh), or Visual Basic Script (on Windows). Scripts were classically slow, each action showed up separately in the undo list, they must be manually invoked, and they were limited to clunky, static user interfaces.

Although InDesign had incredible scripting support (there’s almost no native functionality that can’t be accessed through scripting — and better), there were many clear use cases where a true plug-in was the clear (and only) choice.

On the other hand, scripts are much quicker and inexpensive to develop, as well as easier to debug. Additionally, a buggy script is much less likely to crash InDesign than a buggy plug-in.

Things Got Muddled

As InDesign matured, the scripting engine became more powerful and capable. Each version of InDesign brought a quicker, more efficient scripting engine. In recent versions, except for the most demanding procedures, you can hardly tell the difference between the performance of a “native” plug-in, and an optimized script. Of course the performance of the script will highly depend on how it was written, but a veteran script writer should know how to write scripts that run efficiently.

On top of that was the introduction of events, and Script UI. Events allowed for scripts to run dynamically in the background and Script UI allowed for user interfaces which reacted dynamically to user input and context.

The division between “plug-ins” and “scripts” became very blurred. The only clear differentiating point remained the language the add-on was written in. Plug-ins are written in C++, while scripts are written in one of the higher level scripting languages.

The only two use cases where “plug-ins” remained the clear winner, is where functionality was needed that didn’t exist at all in InDesign, or very high performance was critical.

Hybrid Plug-ins

These distinctions are further blurred by the fact that an add-on does not need to be 100% “script” or 100% “plug-in”. It’s quite possible to mix C++ code with scripting code to create a seamless product (and quite a few of these products exist!) The starting point of such code can be a “script” or the whole thing can be compiled into a single plug-in. It is entirely invisible to the user whether a specific feature is implemented as a “scripting feature” or as a “plug-in feature”. In fact the implementation can be split up into a custom implementation like was done with APID (which we utilize in our products).

Enter: “Extensions”

In CS5, Adobe introduced a new concept: “Extensions”. Extensions can be written using the CS SDK. They are programmed in Flex and ActionScript, and compiled as swf applications. These extensions are an entirely new class of “add-ons”. They have all the capabilities of AIR applications, and all the functionality of integrated scripts. Script Bay is one example of such an extension. Mini Bridge, CS Review, and Kuler are other examples.

Extensions have many of the UI advantages of plug-ins, and can be contained inside native panels. There are quite a few new events in CS5 which allow even tighter integration into the program. In addition, “extensions” can work across the different programs of the Creative Suite.

Conclusion

The basic fact remains. There’s many ways to extend InDesign, and there is no clear “right” way to do it. Sometimes it makes sense to implement a feature as a plug-in. Other times it makes sense to do it as a script, other times, a hybrid, or custom solution is required.

In many situations, it is even difficult to define whether a specific add-on is a “script” a “plug-in” or something else. That fact is, that to the user, it doesn’t really matter that much what the definition of the product is. The technology used to create add-on functionality is mostly a developing consideration. From a user perspective, it’s just important that it allows the user to do what they need!

If you are purchasing a commercial “add-on” don’t concern yourself too much with the technology used to create it.

If you need a custom solution created, things are a bit different. Make sure that whoever you hire is familiar with all these technologies, or you might end up paying extra money for a product which could be created cheaper using a different technology.

Script Bay is a FREE script panel replacement for the entire Creative Suite CS5.

It currently works in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. It is partially compatibility with Flash and Fireworks and to a lesser extent, Bridge.

No, Script Bay will not work in CS4 or earlier. It’s built using the new CS SDK which Adobe introduced for CS5. It’s quite impossible to make it compatible with any version of the Creative Suite prior to CS5. Sorry…

Script Bay is very much a “work in progress”, but it is already far more usable than the script panel in InDesign, and without question more usable than the non-existing ones in Photoshop, Illustrator! We hope to add many exciting new features to Script Bay in the future!

Here’s a quick overview of the current features:

• Script Bay offers the ability to run scripts located anywhere on your hard drive.
• Scripts can be viewed in either a list-view or tree-view.
• The list of scripts can be dynamically filtered, and scripts can be launched via keyboard navigation.
• Scripts can be edited directly in the built-in Script Bay script editor.
• Multiple scripts or folders full of scripts can be run in a single command.
• Script files can be moved, duplicated, deleted, and renamed directly within the panel.
• Scripts run in the Script Bay panel can be undone in InDesign as a single undo.
• Scripts can be easily “installed” into the host application.
• Script Bay has a default “cross-application” folder, and scripts placed in this folder are automatically available to all CS applications.
• Script Bay supports drag & drop for moving around script files as well as loading scripts into the script editor.
• Scripts can be added to Script Bay from anywhere on your hard drive by simple drag & drop.

We have more exciting plans for Script Bay, and we hope you enjoy Script Bay as much as we do!

Installation:

1. Download the latest build of Script Bay from here.
2. Double click on the zxp file which should open Extension Manager CS5. (If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7 with UAC active, you might need to launch Extension Manager as an administrator first.)
3. Upon launching Extension Manager and initiating the installation, you will see the following window:
   
   Click Accept.
4. You will then see this scary window:
   Click install. Don’t worry. All this means is we didn’t yet spend a few hundred dollars on a fancy electronic signature to make this scary window go away.

Use:

Once installed using the Extension Manager, Script Bay will be available for use in all the supported Creative Suite applications. With the exception of InDesign, Script Bay is available via a menu item in the Extensions sub-menu under the Window menu. In InDesign and InCopy, it is available in the same sub-menu as the built-in Script panel (i.e. in the Utilities sub-menu.)

Using Script Bay should be very self explanatory. You can launch a script by double clicking on it, by right clicking and selecting run script, or by clicking on the Run button. If multiple scripts are selected, the run button will run them all.

For a script to be edited in Script Bay’s script editor, the script editor must be visible. You can reveal the script editor by clicking on the code button:

Once the script editor is open, you can click on the “edit” button to load the currently selected script, or just drag a script into the editor area from either the script list or tree, or from a file in you computer’s file system.

When you are finished editing the script, you can run it directly from the editor to test that it works correctly, or save it into the currently selected folder.

To quickly run a script, you can type part of the script name into the script filter, and launch the script by hitting “return”.

Known Issues:

1. Drag and Drop does not work perfectly in all the applications. The application which apparently has the most issues is Photoshop. The problems apparently stem from some bugs in the CS SDK, and Adobe is working on solving these issues.
2. Scripts in InDesign are all run under a single persistent engine. #targetengine directives are currently ignored. We hope to deal with this issue at a later date.
3. The script editor currently supports Javascript and ExtendScript only. AppleScript and VBScript can not be run from the script editor.
4. Applescripts and VBScripts in Photoshop and Illustrator do not currently work when run from Script Bay.
5. A number of the commands do not yet work in Fireworks and Flash. These include Rename, Open, Reveal, Install, and Reveal Installed Scripts.

Here’s a few screen shots:

Script Bay Tree View

Filtered Script List

With Script Editor Open

For your convenience, here are direct links:

Mutilingual Tools Macintosh
Mutilingual Tools Windows
AutoFlow Pro Mactintosh
AutoFlow Pro Windows
InSefer Macintosh
InSefer Windows
InBook Macintosh
InBook Windows

The most obvious improvement is the way settings are set. In previous version of Column Flow, the column settings had to be set by changing the style names. Now column settings can be set using a much more intuitive dialog:

But beyond that, there’s a whole pile of tricks that you can now do with Column Flow that was not possible before. Just to illustrate some of the improvements, we will show the previous configuration dialog followed by the new one:

Old Column Flow Settings

New Column Flow Settings

However to really appreciate what Column Flow can do for you we’re going to discuss the Span Columns feature of CS5 a bit.

When we first learned about the Span Columns feature of CS5, we had some real doubts about updating Column Flow for CS5 compatibility. Span Columns is the feature that people have been asking for years, and we developed Column Flow to fill that need. Now with Span Columns, Column Flow is no longer needed. Or so we thought…

After studying Span Columns however, we came to a very different conclusion. In our opinion, the Span (and Split) Columns feature is perfect for newspaper and advertisement layout. For long-document layout however, we believe it falls short of being the needed solution. Here’s why:

• Span Columns works dynamically. This is great, you say. Right? Well for short articles, yes it is. But for long stories? Not so much. Very long stories can have quite a few column breaks along the way. Even with the incredible job the engineers at Adobe did to optimize the code of breaking the columns, it can be very processor intensive, and editing text at the beginning of a long story can quickly become a very tedious job! Additionally, dynamically created column spanners can be very difficult to adjust. To change the spacing on specific pages would require paragraph-style overrides (if it can be done), which makes the file error prone.

• Span and Split Columns gives very little control over keeps options, and very often keeps are completely ignored to prevent columns from having no text. This can make flowing text correctly extremely difficult!

• Trying to use Span Columns to create a section of text which will always stay together (i.e. keep all paragraphs together) is virtually impossible. InDesign does not have the ability to leave a text column empty. To force a whole section of text to the next page would require manually resizing the text frame — which defeats the whole point of Span/Split Columns.

• There’s no way to ensure that a section of text starts on the baseline grid. You need to set the paragraph style to Align to Grid. This is not a solution which will work for headings which must be aligned to grid only at the top of a column.

• There’s no column-balancing functionality included in Span/Split Columns. If it balances, good. If not? Try to balance it yourself.

• Span Columns only helps within a single story. There’s no way to do cross-story spanning.

• Span Columns does not supply a solution for boxed sections of text.

• Because Span Columns uses one text frame for all the text, transparency settings cannot be applied to headings.

Column Flow addresses all these issues:

• Column Flow does not work dynamically, and we believe that for long documents this apparent disadvantage is really a plus!

• Column Flow gives very precise control over keeps with three different levels of strictness to give you your preferred balance between type-fitting and adherence to keeps rules.

• Column Flow gives an option to keep specific numbers of columns together as a unit, so it will not break across pages.

• Column Flow gives precise control over whether text sections are snapped to the baseline grid. This ensures proper alignment of heading text which is normally not baseline aligned.

• While Column Flow will not balance columns in every situation, Column Flow does performs more column balancing than Span Columns. It can even make pages one line long or short if necessary to balance the columns.

• Column Flow can create spanned headings even across different stories when the Story Tools plugin is used to set up Story Strings.

• Column Flow allows for boxed sections to be created with a border or background.

• Because Column Flow creates a separate text frame for each section, transparency effects can be applied automatically to headings specifically.

Additionally:

• When Column Flow is used in conjunction with AutoFlow Pro, master pages can be automatically applied.

Right now, Column Flow can be downloaded as part of the Layout Tools package here.

Full information on the plug-in may be found in the manual here.

Here are some screen-shots displaying some of the advanced functionality of Column Flow, with and without other In-Tools plug-ins included in the InBook plug-in package:

Illustration of several InBook components working together

Boxed Text Section Created by Column Flow

Hebrew layout

Besides providing CS5 support, our newest update for Formatting Tools includes a new function.

You can now convert all instances of All Caps in your document (or story, selection, etc) to proper small caps.

This brings the formatting functions included in Formatting Tools up to 8 very useful tools!

1. Conditional Paragraph Style Changer: changes paragraph styles based on the beginning contents of the paragraph.
2. Style Between Delimiters: applies character styles to text between specified delimiters without having to break your head with GREP expressions.
3. Create Multi-line Styles: applies paragraph styles to paragraphs with the specified number of lines.
4. Restyle Consecutive Paragraphs: applies a different paragraph style to the first and/or last paragraph of a run of consecutive paragraphs.
5. Apply Next Styles: applies the “next style” settings of the selected paragraph styles in the whole document — enabling you to quickly apply styles to massive amounts of text.
6. Create Hyperlinks from URLs: Intelligently creates proper hyperlinks from URLs in your document.
7. Change Case by Style: allows character case to be changed en-mass based on character or paragraph styles. It also can applys Smart Title Case.
8. Convert All Caps to Small Caps: Converts all caps to small caps and optionally applies a character style.

The newest version can be purchased from the product page and downloaded from here: Macintosh Windows

There’s quite a few new features in many of the InBook/InSefer plugins. We’ll try to get some documentation up over the next few days.

We’ve done only basic testing so far, so these should be considered public beta.

For now here’s direct links to download the updated plugins:

For CS5 compatibility you need the newest version of APID available here:
Macintosh Windows

• InSefer: Macintosh Windows
• InBook: Macintosh Windows

• AutoFlow Pro: Macintosh Windows
• Drop Words: Macintosh Windows
• Formatting Tools: Macintosh Windows
• Layout Tools: Macintosh Windows
• Power Headers: Macintosh Windows
• Proper VJ: Macintosh Windows
• Reflective Objects: Macintosh Windows

The existing version of World Tools should work with CS5 as-is, but we will soon be releasing a new, improved version.

These are both very commonly requested features, and we’re really happy to finally getting them added. This brings the total number of really useful utilities included in Formatting Tools up to seven. (“Conditional Paragraph Style Changer”, “Style Between Delimiters”, “Create One and Two Line Styles”, “Restyle Consecutive Paragraphs”, “Apply Next Styles”, “Create Hyperlinks From URLs”, and “Change Case By Style”.

You can download the new version of Formatting Tools from here for Macintosh and here for Windows

Installation:

Unzip the files, and drag the whole “Formatting Tools” folder to your plug-ins folder. If you don’t have APID installed, make sure to download it from here and install it.

Create Hyperlinks from URLs will automatically create hyperlinks from any text it recognizes as a valid URL. It’s very smart, and will ignore manually inserted line breaks on long URLs as well.

You can select the character style to apply as well as the scope of text to change (Document, Story, or Selection).

Change Case by Style will change all text with the specified style(s) to the selected case.

There are four different options: UPPERCASE, lowercase, Smart Title Case, and Sentence case. Uppercase, lowercase, and sentence case are the same results you would get by changing the case manually. Smart Title Case, is (as the name suggests) very smart! It will automatically convert text to title case based on complex rules!

The rules which the title case uses are as follows:
The first and last words are always capitalized, as well as any word following a period (full stop) or colon. Any compound word separated by a “/”, “.”, dash or m-dash will have the letter immediately following the separator capitalized. Any other word will be capitalized unless it appears in the _title_lowercase.txt file. Any word appearing in the file will be lowercase only if it is not a “starting” word. For example: In the title, “The Last of the Mohicans”, the first word “the” will be capitalized, while the second time “the” appears will not. This is because the first word is the beginning of the sentence. Similarly, in the title, “Lion: The King of the Jungle”, the first word “the” will be capitalized because it follows a colon. The lowercase word file can be edited to include any words you like. All words should be separated by a single space.

Any word appearing in the _title_specialcase.txt file will always be capitalized exactly as it appears in the file, regardless of position. This is useful for words like “InDesign”, “USA”, “UK”, etc., which have capitals in the middle of the word. This file can also be used to force lowercase on specific words and override the default rules. So, let’s assume you would like the word “a” to always be lowercase, even if it is the first word in your header text. You would simply put the word “a” in your special case file, and it will always be lowercase. When a word appears in both files, the special case file supersedes the lowercase one.

The Smart Title Case of Formatting Tools uses the same logic as the Smart Title Case of Power Headers, and you can (and should) use a single set of text files for both plug-ins. If the text files are placed anywhere within the plug-ins folder, they will work. You can also place the files somewhere on your hard disk, and create shortcuts/aliases in the plug-ins folder to the files.

You can select a paragraph style, a character style, or both for options of which text to convert. You can also select what scope of text to convert (Document, Story, or Selection). If neither a character style or paragraph style is selected, all the text in the selected scope will be converted.

FiddleScript — Your tool to fiddle with scripts (without having to fiddle too much).

Download the script from here.

If you are using CS4 or later, you can download the Extension Manager installer instead from here.

Compatibility:

FiddleScript is compatible with InDesign CS3 and higher.

Manual Installation:

1. Download the zip file from here.
2. Unzip the file.
3. Place the resulting file (FiddleScript.jsxbin) in your Script Panel folder.

• There is a Scripts Panel folder in your application folder, as well as your user data folder either one will work. If you want the script to be accessible by all users, make sure to put it in the main application folder.
• For more information on how to locate your script folder, please read this help file here.

Extension Manager (CS4 or later) Installation:

1. Download the .mxp file from here.
2. Double-click on the file, and the Extension Manager will install the script into your main Scripts Panel folder.

• The mxp installer file is designed to work with Adobe Extension Manager Versions CS4 or later. If you have other versions of Creative Suite products installed there is a possibility that your operating system may associate mxp files with an earlier version of the Extension Manager and will try to use that when you double-click the file. If that happens you will see an error alert similar to the one pictured below:
  
  If you do, make sure you use the “open with..” option (by right clicking on the file), and open with the correct version of Extension Manager (i.e. Extension Manager CS4).
• Alternately, you can open the Extension Manager, and click Install as shown below.

Usage:

To run FiddleScript, double-click on the script in your Script Panel. This will bring up a dialog like the one shown:

1. Copy the script code from wherever you got it, and paste the code into the text area.
2. To see the results of the script, click Run Script. If you are using CS4, you will be able to undo the whole script in one step.
3. If you are happy with your script, just click Save Script, type in a name, and your script will be saved to the Scripts Panel.

Some Quick Pointers on Using FiddleScript

• You can click on Load Script to populate the text area with code from a saved script. This is great for making a quick edit on an existing script without ever leaving InDesign. When you are done editing, Just click on Save Script, and you can save it back to your Scripts Panel. You can use the same name to overwrite the original script, or choose a new one.
• After saving a new script to the Scripts Panel, you will need to refresh the Scripts Panel display for it to become visible. To refresh the Panel display you can either close it and re-open it, or switch away from InDesign to another program, and back again.
• The current script will be saved for subsequent runs of FiddleScript. This makes it easy to check the script (or run it numerous times), without having to paste the script into the dialog each time.
• You cannot type a return or tab character into the text in FiddleScript’s dialog. If you need to type a return or tab, use the buttons at the top of the dialog.
• FiddleScript can make your saved script undoable in one step in CS4 and later. To facilitate this, it can wrap your script in a function which can be run in CS4 and later as a single step. By default, the undo Name will be “Run Script”, but you can change it to whatever you want by replacing “Run Script” at the end of the wrapper to whatever you’d like it to be called.
  

  After Wrapped the Script in a Function

“Number Lines by Style” is a script which allows you to add line numbers to text of specific styles. I works by adding anchored text frames at the start of each line. The script will number lines on the current page only.

“Number Lines by Style” was written in its original form for Koren Publishers we thank them for their consent to share it!

Please download the script from here.

Usage

1. Place the script in your Scripts Panel folder
2. Make sure the correct page is active
3. Double click on the script in the Scripts Panel
4. Select the style or styles to number and click OK.

Examples of Use

Here we have a shopping list of the most important things that you could possibly need.

We want to number the list items, so we run the script, and select the Numbered Lines paragraph style:

Which numbers our items:

Of course the example is kind of silly, because we can just use paragraph numbers. The one situation similar to this, where you might want to use this script, is when you’d need the numbers outside the text frame.

A more classic example would be a sitaution where you’d need every line numbered, and the paragraphs are more than one line long:

In this case, you’d run the script and select all the styles used in the essay:

Presto! numbered lines:

• The script uses an object style for the anchored text frames, as well as a paragraph style for the numbers within the frame. You can adjust these styles to tweak the positioning and formatting of the numbers.

Have fun!

This update fixes various bugs, and all users should update.

Please download the update from the downloads page.