Getting rid of unwanted precision

Also note that the measurements you see on the screen might be re-calculated from the internal measurements (I seem to recall ID uses points internally, but that hardly matters).

The issue of a wanted "exact" precision might bite you back in some unexpected ways. For example, if you place an object at "2cm,2cm", it may appear in the document as "2.000001cm,2.000001cm" because of internal rounding. Now, if you want to check if it's still there some time later, hey, there is nothing at "2cm,2cm" (fortunately, there are other ways to identify objects
i not
based on their exact position).
The same happens all the time with Word imported documents, where in the UI you can see a text indent value of "24pt". Well, that's already rounded, as you cannot
i search
for this 'exact' indent of 24pt -- checking with a script reveals it to be, for example, at 23.9947658(etc.).

The precision is a result of base 2 (binary) numbers and base 10 (decimal) numbers not mapping "precisely" on to each other. They're something you have to live with and accommodate in your scripts.

Ah, I realize now that when I first saw your name on this topic, I mistook you for Roy Marshall who does use JavaScript.

If you're comfortable with AppleScript then stay with it. I switched to JavaScript partly because I could never come to grips with AppleScript whose statements and partly because JavaScript is cross-platform.

Nice to see you again (now I've worked out who you are!).

Dave

Hi Dave, it's great knowing you're here. I did open ESTK (for the first time ever - I wasn't even aware of it before), and I looked at all the Number Instance Elements. But I didn't see what you meant, and anyway I'm sticking with AppleScript for the time being, since I haven't found the time even to get back into that lately, after years of laziness just using my old stuff with PageMaker.

Forgetting scripting for the moment, perhaps I can ask you if you've suffered the same general annoyance with all the multiple decimal places. To mention my previous example again, you would click on the tabs ruler in PageMaker and get a tab at an even or a half millimeter, and if you for some reason in an exceptional case wanted something more precise than that you could enter it manually. Is there any reason why it shouldn't be that way now? Or have I missed something, like you should click with the shift key or something if you want an even increment.

Getting back to scripting, I'm sure I can do rounding in AppleScript as well as JavaScript, and I did it with PM scripting to get dimensions on graphics down to a level I would care to resize to in Photoshop. Looking back at the old scripts, ha, I see a "Dave Saunders" folder with a Height Calculating PM script from ten years ago. I also see "Folios Ahoy" and various other things. I guess we'll be in touch again if you're hanging out here and this is a main place for InDesign scripting, but it will be sad for me if you're mainly into JavaScript... though I suppose I could switch, as I've barely started.

Roy McCoy
Rotterdam, NL

Roy,

Use ESTK's Help menu to look at the Core JavaScript object model. Take a look at the Number.toString() method.

Dave