Direct Web3 Integration - InDesign

[JustinTagg]

Hi there, I'm developing a literary platform on the Polygon blockchain and would like to be able to pull text directly from a smart contract into InDesign to be typeset and printed. I'd love to chat with somebody in the community or on the Adobe team about the possibilities of a third-party app (or direct integration) that might facilitate this. 

Can anybody help or recommend an individual to chat to?

Justin

[Manan Joshi]

Hello @JustinTagg,

Although I am not too familiar with the technical details of smart contracts and blockchain but I think that should not matter too much for this discussion. I will assume your app doing its magic as a black box which produces some text and that text needs to be imported into InDeign, I hope this is not an oversimplification of the problem statement.

With that out of the way I have some thought that I mention below

• We could interact with InDesign from your app by executing the JS code that does your work. We can create JS which executes in the InDesign execution environment on double click, you could try to simulate the same in your app code.
• We could investigate using COM/Applescript interface to directly code interactions with InDesign in your app.
•  I have not personally investigated this one but therotically this should work. You could create an InDesign plugin that reads a shared memory/named pipes(not sure which one should be used exactly) written by your app.

-Manan