It’s official! Building a book cover in InDesign will no longer be a geometric nightmare. The new edition of HurryCover is intended to be a definitive answer to the puzzle of complex templates: with or without flaps, with or without wrap, whether you need a hinge margin or a physical spine gap, the template generated by HurryCover³ remains 100% resizable, even if you have already set up the graphic elements of your artwork… Version 3 of HurryCover — rebuilt in the IdExtenso framework — is not a simple facelift. Graphic designers, publishers and printers will finally find the technical ref ..read more

Some scripts we designed in the past for InDesign CS/CS2/CS3—and even CS4—are no longer available or maintained. But, from time to time we still receive queries for these old files—such as IndexBrutal, IndexMatic, Claquos, Equalizer, HurryCover, BookBarcodeCS3… Here is a special repository dedicated to frustrated users. BookBarcode TRY (CS3) Note. — BookBarcode 2.039 (June 2021) no longer supports InDesign CS3. Here is the previous “TRY” version, which despite its restrictions (timer and no batch processing) can still be used to generate EAN13 barcodes in CS3. EAN13 Barcode Builder for InDesig ..read more

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If you are one of the happy users of the IdExtenso scripting framework for InDesign, you may have noticed — or overlooked! — that this enhanced version of ExtendScript provides many additional services, including in the primitive areas of the language. For example, any string immediately has functionalities like trim(), codePointAt(), toUTF8(), which aren't available in the root syntax. Let's take a closer look at this toolbox… Clean Uneval • String.prototype.toSource(?quoteChar) -> string Returns a safe ASCII quoted string in the form "..." (default formatting) such that eval(str.toSource ..read more

InDesign guides are funny creatures. Whether or not they are assigned to a page via the fitToPage property, they remain firmly anchored to the geometry of the spread they belong to. The most mysterious thing is their location attribute, which does not obey all the principles ordinarily weighing on rulers coordinates. This article explores how to determine correct positions in all scenarios… Here's a simple as pie exercise from an end-user perspective. In the configuration below, push the horizontal and vertical guides onto the target point. (Click on the image to see the whole landscape): We ..read more

Every release of InDesign — even as paltry as version 19 (labeled 2024) — finds a way to break a deep feature that has worked perfectly since the Neolithic era. This time around, Adobe disabled ScriptUI colors for text labels, sabotaging the readability of the IndexMatic³ dialog. A compatibility update is available now… I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Adobe script developers spend most of their time not implementing the brilliant algorithms they have in mind, but fixing or working around the magma of bugs, inconsistencies and instabilities that the host application inflicts ..read more

Despite the advent of the UXP era, our ExtendScript framework ‘IdExtenso’ still has diehard fans — starting with myself. Its main advantage is its backward compatibility with previous versions of InDesign, as well as its proven stability for long-term projects. → For example, note that IndexMatic³ is built from A to Z in IdExtenso. IdExtenso version 2.31008 (Oct. 8, 2023) has just been released on GitHub. It contains some essential additions and fixes in the core branch, but above all an impressive number of new etc modules that I could not summarize here. The best is therefore to go to the C ..read more

Un nouveau livre-arsenal de Laurent Tournier vient de paraître : Optimiser InDesign pour les documents longs — Avec les scripts et le GREP. Si vous pensiez à une aimable mise en jambes agrémentée de quelques points de doctrine, vous êtes loin du compte ! Le PDF que l'auteur nous a communiqué en primeur recense plus de 200 scripts du monde entier, tous testés en situation, et le même volume de commandes GREP couvrant les problématiques les plus étendues. L'idée était déjà géniale en soi, mais la mise en œuvre, par sa densité et sa précision, fait tomber à la renverse… D'entre nou ..read more

With its hundreds of interconnected features and its documentation erected in front of you like a Gothic cathedral, IndexMatic³ will undoubtedly inspire you with this fateful question: where to start? And we often start with something concrete, a specific problem that needs to be solved right now. The purpose of this page is to guide you quickly and clearly into the inner workings of the program, from the questions most frequently asked to the tech support… 1/ General Points     Learning IndexMatic³     IndexMatic³ vs. IndexMatic²      ..read more