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Participant
February 18, 2009
Question

Automatically place images within multiple InDesign documents

  • February 18, 2009
  • 7 replies
  • 2015 views
I work for a publishing company of agricultural trade magazines and work on few titles each month. We are trying to streamline our production procedures and previous company I worked for had a script they used to place images within text pages by searching for the file name, however there were some limitations with this script (it would only work within 1 InDesign document and only within 1 InDesign story at a time). The company I am with now breaks out each editorial story into separate InDesign files and we place image boxes when the display ads are going to go. For our purposes now, I am looking for a script that, once all of the image boxes were tagged with the image file names, could search between multiple InDesign documents in a folder and automatically place all the images for us. Is anything like this available or able to be created? If so, would it have the capacity to search between multiple InDesign documents and search the entire document for the image file names? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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7 replies

MSchmiedsAuthor
Participant
February 19, 2009
I can send you a sample document of how we lay out the stories in our books. We would probably need someone to write the script - I do not know how to write scripts.

I'll send over a sample now - my e-mail is mattschmieds@yahoo.com (so you know what to look for).

Thanks!

Matt
Kasyan Servetsky
Legend
February 19, 2009
Hi Matt,

Since image boxes are tagged by a specific program I need to see a sample document to tell you whether these tags can be accessed by script. (askoldich@yahoo.com)
Do you want somebody to write the script for you or to do it yourself?

Kasyan
MSchmiedsAuthor
Participant
February 19, 2009
Hi Kasyan,

They were tagged using a program called Pathways created by a computer programmer the company used at the time. The issues that I was working on were annual Buyers' Guides so they were mainly just listings and inline graphics. The kinds of issues I work on now are monthly issue with various stories and no inline graphics, but display advertisements. And each story is created and laid out in a separate InDesign document. So I would need a script that can search an entire group of documents for file names and/or image boxes instead of just in one story in one document for inline graphics. (sorry if this is confusing).

I currently do not have a script to work from and am looking for something new that can be used to save use the time of placing every ad manually.

Thanks for your help and feedback!

Matt
Kasyan Servetsky
Legend
February 18, 2009
>...once all of the image boxes were tagged with the image file names...

How were they tagged: in labels panel, by XML tags or in some other way?

>Is anything like this available or able to be created?

Certainly, such a script can be created.

A few days ago there was a discussion on replacing file names in text with inline images:
Kasyan Servetsky, "Positioning Inline images? [CS3 JS WIN]" #3, 13 Feb 2009 10:36 am

Do you want to revise your old script to process all stories in every document that located in some folder? If so, post it.

Kasyan
Green4ever
Inspiring
April 28, 2011

The link is broken now... can you pls give a alternate one if available?

--------

Green4ever

MSchmiedsAuthor
Participant
February 18, 2009
My apologies, I copied the wrong thing (to many things going on at the moment! lol) the version is 10.4.11, not 3.0.4.

Thanks!
MSchmiedsAuthor
Participant
February 18, 2009
Sorry, I should have mentioned that - We work on Mac Version 3.0.4
Known Participant
February 18, 2009
hi

what platform - PC or MAC ?

robin

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