batch Indesign processing

[NUVART]

Hi all,

I am thinking for a while at why Indesign doesn't have a way to "record" actions like in Photoshop? I know you can do a lot of staff with scripting, but scripting is not easy (at least not for myself). I was thinking how usefull would be to tell Indesign to go to a certain location (folders and subfolders), to find Indd files, open them and apply to them a serie of commands (found in native Indesign tools or commands) and save the results to a destination at user's choice. Does anybody have a "simple" solution to this? I am sure that all Indesign users will appreciat such a powerfull feature/tool.

[Harbs.]

No. There's nothing like that available.

Sorry.

Harbs

[Jongware]

> apply to them a serie of commands (found in native Indesign tools or commands) ...

What sort of commands are you thinking of? Most tools require human interaction, such as "click here" or "drag there". A script is great for drawing the same rectangle, with the same stroke and fill, at the same position and size in a thousand files. But if you want to have it drawn at another position or with another fill color, you'll have to rewrite the script.

There are already scripts to batch convert documents to PDF and other export formats (check out Peter Kahrel's site for those).

That said, the basics of looping over a user selectable folder and its subfolders and doing *something* on each file is fairly straightforward. I do that when I need to update paragraph styles in a set of documents for a single book, for example.

[Colin Flashman]

@NUVOmagazine

Scripting within indesign is ONE option, but one avenue that i've recently discovered is within the operating system itself, and for me that is the Mac OS. Have been using automator to drag and drop indesign files onto an icon to have the "droplet" run various tasks. It's more of a visual interface and IMHO easy to use.