Meeting Notes Archive

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Our chapter representative, Mark Atchley, started off the meeting with a number of announcements and calls for appreciation for our sponsors. Remember that members get discounts from Adobe Press, Peachpit Press, and Total Training.

The main presentation was by Peter Truskier of Premedia Systems. He talked about AppleScripting — and explained how easy it is, due to the natural language used.

Premedia Systems Visit their website. http://www.premediasystems.com

He quickly demonstrated the basics of writing a script, and then opened Script Debugger and demonstrated how to modify existing scripts. Peter suggested finding scripts from Adobe Studio and the Adobe forums. The best idea is to find scripts that approximate what you want to achieve, and then modify them for your specific needs.

Adobe Studio Visit their website. http://www.studio.adobe.com

He also showed how to access scripts from within InDesign®. He explained that JavaScript can be run only from within the application. Actual size isn’t actual size, and he showed a script to remedy this. Option-clicking on a script will open it in Showed Indexer. He then went on to describe the terminology of and differences between lists, classes, and if/else and tell/end tell statements.

Peter then showed some scripts from Olav Kvern, one of Adobe’s scripting gurus.

He clarified the benefit of undoing frequent steps through the script, rather than undoing the whole script.

There are some sample scripts available in the Scripting Guide on your InDesign CD. The scripts include:

• Find existing settings, and then revert them
• Display ruler
• Display layout
• Display units

Peter made sure that everyone (at least Mac owners) was comfortable with using and attempting to modify scripts.

A good evening — followed by the raffle.

Meeting notes submitted by John Feld of PC Graphics Report.

PC Graphics Report Visit their website. http://www.pcgraphicsreport.com

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