With CS5, some things have changed

My admittedly old CD for InDesign 5 (Windows) is no longer readable. Where can I find a guide to scripting?

Hi everyone, I am running a VB script that I wrote for InDesign CS2 on CS5. The code below does not seem to work. Does CS5 understand Changecase? If someone knows or could point me to the CS5 VB script reference I would greatly appreciate it. I can't seem to locate any information.

.Paragraphs(2).Changecase (idSentencecase)

Thank you for helping!

Mike

With a script that worked OK in CS4 I now find that when I set the strokewidth of a frame to 0 the result is a frame having a stroke of 1 pt, using the default TextFrame Object style. In both cases I used the same template file to start with so the Object Style is somehow changed or is now applied and not inprevious versions ? Do I need to set the ObjectStyle to None on all frames in CS5 to avoid this ?

Apologies for cross posting this to both mailing list and forums, I'm not sure what most people are using.

Just starting to look at moving the company from CS3 to CS5/5.5 and updating the scripts has been, well, interesting.  The inability to directly refer to page items via their Label has been quite a challenge as EVERYTHING we do names frames and subsequently refers to them by that name.

One thing that has me stuck is why the following doesn't throw an error in a try block if the frame doesn't exist.

set myFrame to item 1 of all page items whose label is "kim"

I simply end up with an undefined variable. I would have thought if it didn't exist and myFrame was undefined an error should be returned.

Am I missing something here or is this expected behaviour?

I've just found another issue regarding restoration of styles to a frame. In CS3 we used to simply get the parent story properties from the frame, place the new text and then reapply the properties to restore the style. In CS5 this breaks as it simply applies the default paragraph style despite the properties holding all the individual style elements. I'm thinking this will necessitate applying individual properties (font, leading, tracking, kerning, etc etc) and that's gonna be horrible. If someone has a workaround for this I would appreciate it.

It's been a long time since I wrote these scripts and there's a LOT of work in updating them to follow the new syntax - this is going to be a far more substantial task than I was expecting.

cheers

'k

Just found another really unfortunate change in CS5. It is no longer safe to issue:

myTextFrame.lines[-1].baseline

even when the text frame is known to contain at least one line because if that line contains a partial table that is not completely set (i.e., the story goes overset before the end of the table) you'll get "Invalid request in the current state".

Possibly worse, if the table is completely set, rather than get the bottom coordinate of the part of the table in the text frame, you instead get the baseline of the actual bottom of the last row of the table no matter which text frame it might actually be in on whichever page.

A really sad state of affairs that wipes out my script that does vertical justification of tables.

Dave

So far, I've slept through all the CS5 activity because our customers have been using CS3 and CS4, but now, some of them are putting their toes into the CS5 water and so I'm finally paying attention to what is now the release before last (ah well).

According to the CS5 OMV, Text.contents returns either a String or a SpecialCharacters enumerator. But this code is failing on me:

var txtSample = oSetText.contents.replace(/\t/g,"[Tab]");

A couple of other things I've noticed:

1. The Book.exportFile() parameters have changed (which bring them more in line with Document.exportFile()), so:

CS4: myBook.exportFile(myPdfFile, false)

CS5: myBook.exportFile(ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE, myPdfFile)

2. The regular expression engine seems to have been changed slightly, in CS5 you now have to escape pipes.

Consider the expression:

$.writeln('test'.replace(/|/g, '|'));

CS4: 'test'

CS5: '|t|e|s|t'

You have to escape the pipe like this:

$.writeln('test'.replace(/\|/g, '|'));

In case anyone's interested: In the VB object model (not sure of anything else) the idTextWrapTypes was changed to idTextWrapModes.

Not sure why, but there 'tis.

Hi all,

we just tracked down a bug to the E4X implementation in ExtendScript. Fixed in CS5, but unfortunately that project is still CS4.

First, be assured that below syntax is no typo - for details see the XML section in the JavaScript Tools Guide. The code implements different approaches to initialize a simple XML object (the ExtendScript brew, not InDesign's XMLElement) with a single element and text content. The curly brackets within the embedded XML literal are a way to pass on JavaScript expressions.

The only problem here - some kind of conversion is taking place under the hood. Speaking in InDesign character codes, the paragraph end character (13) is silently converted into a forced line break (10). Not good if this XML is later returned into InDesign ...

Dirk

( function () {

  var aCRbLFc = "a\rb\nc";
  $.writeln(aCRbLFc.charCodeAt(1),"/",aCRbLFc.charCodeAt(3));

  // => 13,10

  // first attempt / redundant XML wrapping.
  var xml = new XML(<tag>{aCRbLFc}</tag>);
  var hmm = xml.child(0).toString();
  $.writeln(hmm.charCodeAt(1),"/",hmm.charCodeAt(3));
  // => 10,10

  // second attempt / straight XML literal
  var xml = <tag>{aCRbLFc}</tag>;
  var hmm = xml.child(0).toString();
  $.writeln(hmm.charCodeAt(1),"/",hmm.charCodeAt(3));
  // => 10,10

  // inconsequent, but works:
  var xml = new XML(<tag/>);
  xml.appendChild(aCRbLFc);
  var hmm = xml.child(0).toString();
  $.writeln(hmm.charCodeAt(1),"/",hmm.charCodeAt(3));
  // => 13,10

} )();

Edit: formatting attempt

I noticed today the the Object Model for CS4 has xmlItems.ItemByName, but the Object Model for CS5 does not. I'm trying to work out how to reference an XML Element by name in CS5. xmlItems.item("myElementName") doesn't work. Any ideas?