In 2019 I decide it was time to learn how to write scripts for InDesign. After only a month of learning JavaScript and ExtendScript, I was able to write my very first working script. It simply closed the active InDesign book, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
The first script I wrote that actually improved my workflow is this timeline builder. It pulls date-pairs out of a story, orders them chronologically, and then plots them on a timeline. The script also builds data labels, filler text, assigns the color to a swatch, and creates paragraph styles.
In this demo video first run it on "real" text that we use for Chief Learning Officer magazine. I then run it again on a much longer story where it generates 200+ dates for the timeline. You can see the timeline in a finished magazine here
Our post production work took a colleague four hours for each issue. When that colleague left and the work was given to me I knew I need a way to automate it.
I wrote a script that exports each magazine section as a text file, and exports all the images in two sizes. It also straightens rotated images before exporting them, and exports the magazine cover in two sizes.
Our post production work was reduced to 10-20 minutes.
This is a vey simple script that finds the potential word count of a selected text frame.
The word count comes from randomly generated filler text so the counts have some variation every time it is run.