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L
LuxThill
Participant
June 13, 2009
Question

Usign Indesign to automate the magnifing of texts for visually impaired students

  • June 13, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 646 views

Hello everyone,


I'm working in a transcription unit in an insitute for visually impaired children in Luxemburg and I and my  transcription unit have opted for Indesign instead of MS Word for our transcriptions of schoolbooks and other textbooks.


The problem is that a larger Fontsize up to 28pt necessarily occupies more space on paper.
But students need to know the page numbers of the "sourcebook".
So far until nowadays, we've created in MS Word, one section per sourcebook page and it was Word which numbered the pages within a section, e.g. page 36-1, 36-2, 36-3 if the page 36 of the book took 3 pages in the larger transcripted version.

This took a lot of time, essentially for large books.
I want to use the Indesign scripting capabilites to help us out for automating a part or all of this following work.
Currently, there are texts in the form


xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
21
page break

xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
22
page break

...

Once enlarged, the sourcepage 21 will take e.g. 2 pages and 22, 3 pages. The goal is to get (by a script or another trick)

The best would be that the numbers become real Indesign page numbers to be able to add some other texts in respect of the booknumbering.



XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
21-1
page break

XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
21-2
page break

XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
22-1
page break

XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
22-2
page break

XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
22-3
page break

...

If anyone of you (scripting gurus) can help me to finf out a solution for this problem, I would be very grateful as well as all members of my transcription service and visually impaired students also.

Thanks in advance

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

D
Dave_Saunders
Inspiring
June 13, 2009

That can certainly be scripted, but it's not the kind of script one can just bang out here. For one thing, you've not mentioned which version of InDesign you're using, and which scripting language you wish to use.

If you're looking to employ someone to do this task, you'll need to provide sample documents and be prepared to spend some time discussing the details of your workflow.

Dave

L
LuxThillAuthor
Participant
June 13, 2009

Hi, thank you for anwering.

Actually, we use ID CS3, but we already bought CS4 and not yet installed.

I work in a Windows environment, therefore, not AppleScript.

I suggest that Javascript may be a solution, but only know a little bit this language. Is there something else for scripting ID under Windows?
We are not a very large structure and do not have the budget to hire people to programm this workflow.
In MS Word we inserted a section break after each book pagenumber and were added by hand in the footer this book pagenumber and behind this number the current page number in the section. Since I am not at the office for now, I can only attach samplefiles on Monday or Tuesday.

As the pagenumbers  in each section begins with 1 again, we got almost automatically
(manually typed book pagenumber) - (page within section)

102-1, 102-2, 102-3.

Of course there is a lot of manual work, but until nowadays it's the only way to perform the workflow.

Jean-Claude

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