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.

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.

Quick Reference is a script created to simplify the process of creating cross references. Thanks to David Blatner on his helpful suggestions when we were creating this script. You can read more about Quick Reference on InDesign Secrets here.

Creating cross references in InDesign is a somewhat painful process. You need to find the destination, and create a destination anchor. You then need to select the source text and create the new cross reference. You can also use references to text without anchors, but that’s even more painful to create.

We created Quick Reference to make this process less painful. To use Quick Reference, you just select the source text, and Quick Reference will give you a list of potential destinations. You just select the correct one, and hit enter. Quick Reference will do the rest of the work for you.

Installation:

We are including two different files for download: a zip file of the script, and an Extension Manager “mxp” file. You can use either one to install the script. Please download one (or both) of the files from here: Extension Manager File or Zip File

Installation using Extension Manager:

Installation should be as simple as a double click on the “MXP” file.

If you have CS3 installed, you might get an error when trying to open the file such as the one shown:

This is because Extension Manager (CS3) is trying to open the package and does not recognize CS4. If you get this error, you will need to install manually or to change the default application which opens the mxp file to Extension Manager CS4.

To install manually, open Extension Manager CS4 and click on the install button shown:

Once Extension Manager installs the script, you can enable and disable the script in Extension Manager:

If using Extension Manager is too much trouble, you can install the script manually.

To do this, download the zip file and decompress it.

You’ll need to place the whole folder as-is in you main scripts folder:

Usage:

Using Quick Reference is easy.

1. Select Source Text:
   

   Select Source Text

2. Select Create Quick Reference:
   
3. Select the destination in the dialog:
4. When you have the correct destination selected, hit Create, and you’re done!

A few tips on the use of Quick Reference:

• You must select the correct Cross Reference Format to use for your cross reference. (You can create or change them in the cross reference panel.) The selection should be the last format used in your document
• Quick Reference will either replace the current selection with a cross reference, or append the cross reference to the end of your selection. You should select the correct radio button.
• Quick Reference ignores trailing punctuation and spaces. If you want punctuation and/or space between the selected text and the cross reference make sure you select the trailing punctuation and/or trailing space.
• The listing of destinations will usually be in order within the text, so the correct destination will usually be the top one on the page.
• If the document is part o a book and the book document is open. Quick Reference will find destinations in the entire book. When this is the case, the name of the destination document will appear in the list of destinations.

Before we go on, make sure you download the scripts from here.

Situation #1

You have a headline which must fit to the margin widths. It may even be a two line heading. What to do?

“Fit Text To Frame” to the rescue!

Before

After

There’s two scripts which are used in this situation: FitTextPrefs, and FitTextToFrame.

FitTextPrefs allows you to set some simple preferences for the Fit Text to Frame script. When you run FitTextPrefs, you get presented with a dialog with four options:

The first two options will expand the text frame down to the bottom baseline or descender respectively only if necessary.

The last two options will move the frame bottom either up or down to fit the frame bottom ensuring that the frame bottom always fits the text.

Once we set the preferences, a simple double-click on the FitTextToFrame script will fit the text of the current frame.

Some quick pointers on using Fit Text to Frame:

• Fit Text to Frame will attempt to bring any overset text back into the text frame. This might result in more than one line.
• If there are multiple lines in the text frame, the text of the longest line will be fit to the frame. All other text will be scaled proportionally.
• Text of different sizes will all be scaled proportionally.
• If all the text cannot be fit, Fit Text to Frame will abort.
• Fit Text to Frame does not adjust leading. If there are multiple lines, it usually works best if the leading is set to “Auto”.

Situation #2

You have the unlucky job of fitting a story into a predefined space. You tried to explain to the client that to properly fit text takes a lot of finesse and very often copy-editing, but they won’t hear of it. You will need to fit the text exactly to the text frame precisely 30 seconds before it goes to press.

Fill Text Frame to the rescue!

Before Fill

After Fill

Fill Text Frame is really very basic. It will scale all the text currently in the frame to the maximum size that will fit in the frame without spilling out of the frame.

• Fill Text Frame will not bring back any text which is overset.
• Fill Text Frame scales all the text proportionally.
• Fill Text Frame does not adjust leading. It usually works best if the leading is set to “Auto”.

The script can be downloaded from here, and it supports InDesign CS3 and CS4.

The options are pretty straight-forward:

1. Scaling: You can select the horizontal and vertical scale, that you would like to make the images.
   • Next to the horizontal and vertical scaling fields, there is a check-mark labeled “Relative”. If this check-mark is checked, the images will be scaled to a percentage of their current size. If the check-mark is not checked, the scaling will be done to absolute values.
2. Image Offset: You can set an offset for the images. Please note: The images will be offset — not the graphic frame which contains them. This might change the way an image is cropped.
3. Location: Images can be scaled/moved on the current page, spread, or the entire document.
4. Relative Location: The graphics can first be centered before they are scaled. If “Centered” is selected, the graphics will be centered within their frames.
5. Fitting: There are 6 fitting options, which besides for “None” correspond to the fitting options available in the Object menu.
6. Limit to Images: If this check-mark is checked, only raster images will be scaled or moved.

You can download the script from here.

Beware that this is an advanced topic and not for the faint of heart! It is a complicated setup, but it does a good job of demonstrating the deeply powerful capabilities of Power Headers.

Here are the problems:

1. The headers must contain the range of both the chapters and the verses which appear in the text. Because there a ranges for both chapers and verse, but the verses are contained in the chapters, the headers can appear in two forms:

The red arrows show the chapter numbers, while the green arrows show the verse numbers. When there is only one chapter on a page, the format is: 1. Chapter number-slash, 2. first verse – hyphen, 3. last verse.

When there are two chapters on the page, the format must be: 1. First Chapter number-slash, 2. first verse, 3. N-dash, 4. Last Chapter Number – slash, 5. last verse. Being that there are a minimum of at least four different variables which might or might not appear on the page, this is a seemingly hopeless situation!

2. To further complicate matters, there are sometimes one, and sometimes two verses per line. When there are two verses per line the verse numbers appear with a dash separating them like this:

If we were to simply use a First and/or Last instance, we would sometimes end up with text that looks like [verse_a]-[verse_b]-[verse_c], so we need a way to pick up the first number if it’s the first instance, but the second number if it’s the last instance.

Solutions:

If not for problem #2, we could automate this with three variables, and even factoring in that problem it would probably be possible with four variables (or three with an additional variable-level GREP Processor), but for simplicity sake, we will use six variables to make each instance a separate variable. Since each variable adds time to the updating, you would normally want to do it with as few variables as possible, but we wanted to keep this how-to as simple as possible.

Step #1: Create six different character styles — one for each variable:

Step #2: Right click on the header frame and give the header frame a label:

Step #3: Create the chapter variables.

The first chapter variable should be a “Current Instance” variable which will display the previously found chapter unless the chapter number is at the start of the new page — in which case it will display the one appearing at the top of the page.

The chapter header adds text after which will act as a separator between the chapter number and the verse number:

The second chapter variable should be a “Last Instance” variable.

The chapter header adds text after which will act as a separator between the chapter number and the verse number, as well as a dash to act as the separator between the first chapter/verse and the second one:

Step #4: Create the four verse variables.

Variable 1

Variable #2

Variable #3

Variable #4

As you can see, we inserted a dash (Hebrew “makaf”) to serve as a separator between variables #1 and #2, and between variables #3 and #4.

Step #5:We now have the basic setup for all our variables. We will insert the variables on the master page, and see what these variables produce:

To insert the variables, we put the text cursor in the header frame and right click:

Repeat the process for each of the headers in their correct order:

Step #6: Update the headers to see what they produce:

Verse Range

Chapter Range

As you see, all the information appears in the header, but it makes no sense in any context. When it’s a verse range, the entire second half of the header should be removed, and when it’s a chapter range, we need to do “surgery” to remove the third and fifth variables.

Step #7: Add conditional text to variable “ChapterB”:

To enable the removal of the last three variables on a page where we will have a “verse range”, we insert a “Conditional Text” of “Remove”. This text will be inserted on any page which does not contain a chapter number (which by definition means it will need a “verse range” as apposed to a “chapter range”.

Step #8: Create the first Global GREP Processor

Global GREP Processors run after all the variables are updated, so we can use them to assess the general state of all the variables as they interact with each other. This Global GREP Processor is actually quite simple. It will remove all text from the word Remove until the end of the header frame text:

Now let’s check that it worked:

Before

After

Great!

Step #9: Create Global GREP Processors for chapter ranges.

To fix up the “chapter range” headers shown above we will need two different Global GREP Porcessors. One will remove the third variable and the other will remove the fifth variable. Once those two variables are removed, our “chapter range” headers will appear as they should:

Remove Third Variable

Remove Fifth Variable

These GREP queries are actually a lot simpler than they appear. The fact that they are search right-to-left text make them much harder to read than they would be if they were in Latin letters.

The first GREP query is as follows:

([\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}]+)?[\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}]+(?= — )

Because of peculiarities of using GREP with right-to-left languages, we used the unicode notation of the GREP string instead of the actual characters. The unicode value of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is o5D0 and the last is 05EA. Basically this string searches for any number of Hebrew letters which it saves as a saved group. This is followed by a Hebrew makaf (dash) followed by any number of Hebrew characters with a positive look-ahead for a space, em-dash, space. A rough equivalent in English would be: ([a-z]+)-[a-z]+(?= — )

The GREP which removes the fifth variable is similar: ( — [\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}]+ / )[\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}]+?(?=[\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}])

After creating these two GREP Processors and updating the headers we get what we need for the “chapter ranges”:

Before

After

Step #10: Fix a hole in the logic:

There is one problem with the logic we used to identify “chapter ranges” and “verse ranges”. When a page starts a new chapter, there is in fact only one chapter on the page, so it needs a verse range, but since ther was an instance of a chapter number on the page, the extra chapter variable was not correctly removed:

To fix this problem requires two more GREP Processors. The first one fixes the content, but a second one is required to fix the formatting. The second one is needed due to a peculiarity of InDesign’s GREP functionality: When you use GREP to remove content in text of mixed formatting, the formatting can get messed up under certain circumstances.

The first GREP Processor finds Chapter numbers which repeat themselves:

The GREP query for this is: ([\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}]+)( / [\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}]+) ~_ \1 /

The “\1″ is used to locate the text found in the first group which will find chapter numbers which repeat themselves.

This will result in a header which looks like this (notice the bold letters in the first half of the verse range):

This requires this GREP Processor to fix up the formatting which searches for text strings unique to the verse headers and applies one of the verse header character styles:

We now end up with a correctly formatted “verse range”:

Step #11: Fix Verse Ranges:

The only step left to do is to fix the cases where we more than one verse per line,

and by consequence, a source range in the source text which results in a header like this:

If we were not using the Hebrew makaf to separate the ranges, this would not be a problem, because we could just use “First Word” and “Last Word” variables. The problem is that Hebrew makafs are identified as regular word characters.

To fix this, we need to create variable-specific GREP Processors. The difference between variable specific GREP Processors, and Global GREP Processors is that the variable-specific ones are run on only the text specific to that variable, while the global ones are run on the entire header frame after all the headers are updated.

We will create one for variable VerseA:

and another one for variable VerseB:

Now after updating, the headers are all correct:

There you have it! Simple as pi!

Warning: Bad Typography ahead!

Although it’s always the best practice to let InDesign do its thing and give you the best typographic results that it can, there are times when you might want to “freeze” the composition of text. Here’s a few examples:

1. You are moving a document between different versions of InDesign where they have improved the text engine and you get different line breaks.
2. You have an obstinate client who insists that lines need to break “just so” and not move.
3. You are replicating an existing work, and the line breaks must match.

I’m sure there are more horrible scenarios, but these three come to mind… ;0

To deal with these (bad) situations we crated this small script which freezes the composition of the selected text by using the no-break attribute and soft returns. It also allows for scaling of the glyphs (ugh!) in case you add additional text to the line. (I can’t believe I’m writing this!)

You can download the script from here. (But please use carefully, and don’t blame us for the results!)

After the release of Power Headers 2.0, a few issues came up which we have fixed in version 2.0.1. Please download the newest version. Here’s the download for the Mac version, and here’s the Windows version.

Don’t forget to download APID version 1.0.47 if you haven’t already done so.

Issues fixed:

• We fixed bug which prevented the use of the context menu to label header frames before a variable was defined.
• We fixed a bug which under certain circumstances caused the “Current Instance” to show the wrong text.
• We fixed a bug where the separator was inserted on pages with one instance when Current and Last or All Instances was selected.
• We changed the default “inclusion option” setting to display headers on pages which do not contain source text.