Seattle InDesign User Group Meeting Notes Archive
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Scripting With Olav Martin Kvern
Adobe’s scripting evangelist brought two computers and switched back and forth between his PC and Mac to show how you can use both AppleScript and VBScript to control InDesign®. The languages are similar conceptually, though quite different when you look at how you write the code. Ole started with the basics. Edwina volunteered to write her first script with Olav’s guidance, as we watched “Hello World” appear in a new InDesign document. Ole proceeded to talk about using scripts for repetitive tasks and for creating design elements one wouldn’t normally consider creating.
Hijacking AppleScripts
Colin Fleming discussed how to use scripts from the InDesign Scripting Guide as the basis for building your own custom scripts. Use the Scripting Guide on your InDesign CD as a starting point, and then experiment a bit.
Colin’s demo used the scripts in the Scripting Guide. He looked at a couple of scripts and started assembling elements to build a script that constructed a new InDesign file with a series of layers and a master page, and then applied that master to all the pages in the new document. He uses this script to construct basic document properties that he uses frequently. This differs only a bit from using templates, but serves as a good example of what an AppleScript could do.
Colin’s PDF presentation and the completed AppleScript are available on his website. The completed script needs to be pasted into your script editor and saved as a compiled script. You can download the script from the link below.
Plug-in Watch
Colin also demonstrated Teacup Software’s Workspace Manager. This plug-in will rearrange your palettes depending on which of six states you’re working in. This plug-in watches to see if you’re working with objects, text frames, text, groups of things, or paths (splines), or if you’re working with nothing selected, and will move or show/hide palettes to match your workspace.
It’s a pretty wild plug-in to work with; reading the manual is important to understand the options you can control. In its default mode it will autoload each workspace, and, if you move palettes in that workspace, it remembers and updates the state of all palettes. This means you can have a lot of screen redraw as you switch workspaces.
Learn more about Teacup Software in our Plug-ins section.
Transparency: Best Practices for Successful Output
Adobe’s Lisa Forrester talked about the best ways to work with Illustrator® and InDesign transparency. A common theme of her tips had to do with avoiding flattening until the last stage. There are certain times in a design or production process when the file is flattened. We’re all used to flattening a Photoshop® file just before making a TIFF file. The concept is similar yet different in InDesign and Illustrator. We used to save flattened TIFFs for production, but now most of us can use native layered Photoshop files with InDesign. Likewise, we can use native layered Illustrator files with InDesign instead of saving EPS files. The flattening Lisa was talking about is in the print process. When you tell InDesign to print your file, it will be flattened in the print process. How your work is flattened is controlled with your flattener settings. Flattener styles let you control the resolution of rasterization and maintain vector qualities. You can build a flattener style and you can apply flattener styles to particular spreads, or you can have InDesign use one flattener style for all spreads that need to be flattened.
More thought should be used when you export to a PDF. InDesign can create Acrobat 4 or Acrobat 5 PDFs: An Acrobat 4 file must be flattened when it’s created, while an Acrobat 5 file isn’t flattened. Maintaining an unflattened file as long as possible allows for the service provider to use the flattener style that is most suited to its output device. The general rule of thumb for end users is to be sure you are using at least the high-resolution setting when printing on a device higher than 600 dpi and/or creating a PDF 1.3 file.
Best Practices for Transparency
- Keep text on a separate and higher layer than raster effects.
- When using a drop shadow, always use some blur amount.
- Maintain unflattened files and data as long as possible in your workflow.
- Use the high-resolution flattener style for printing on devices above 600 dpi and in creating high- resolution PDFs based on Acrobat 4.
Thanks for the Prizes!
Adobe Press, Peachpit Press, and David Blatner donated books for our raffle. Thanks to Adobe, one lucky person will receive Acrobat 6 when it ships. And a big thanks to Lawrence Horowitz of Teacup Software for offering a copy of his Workspace Manager for the raffle too. Thanks to all of our donors.
Thanks for the Ideas!
We’ve looked at your ideas and we’ll see if we can incorporate your topics in future meetings. I’ll be contacting those who volunteered to help out with future meetings. We appreciate the help.
And Thanks for the Help!
Thanks to Gene, Alice, Ed, and Sheila for helping out with the meeting. This help is really important in making the meeting easier to run and organize. We also thank Adobe for the facility, the pizza, the support, and the incredible InDesign resources we have here in Seattle — we’re really lucky! Anyone interested in helping out with the meeting, or anyone with an idea for a future topic, contact this chapter’s representative.
Photos From This Meeting!
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
See the photos.
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