Does Adobe plan on updating ESTK and OMV to 64-bit for Catalina?

Despite automation and batching, for me it's still a lot of work to create my User Friendly HTML versions. (Although the main cause of stalls and problems always seem to be that those writing this OMV data suddenly do *something* totally unexpected and unprecedented in the dozen-or-so previous versions ...) But OTOH if you indeed have scriptable plugins, it should be doable to generate only a subset of the full set -- say, something like "generate Class X only". It does require you to know the class name in advance, but then again one is expected to have certain Reasonable Skills before endeavouring unto something such scripting external plugins ...

I might be able to look into such a poor-mans Subset Help, if an HTMLized version is good enough.

(Also: is there any other useful format than HTML? On the premise that this should be an easy one to convert to -- I am NOT going to write out the custom help file format for every obscure editor someone might be using some day.)

Btw, it could have come worse:

As mentioned by Manan, Adobe has solved the most pressing problems by providing that VSCode debugger extension, that also covers jsxbin generation.

On the other hand in the past several months I've used VSCode on some unrelated node.js project and still run into plenty annoyances so I permanently switch between VSCode, Xcode and BBEdit. For adhoc InDesign scripting I still prefer ESTK or - via an own plugin - Chrome DevTools.

As I understand it the missing OMV is mainly a problem in the InDesign family of applications, because the other products don't have the luxury of an extensible terminology.

When you seriously consider the .tlb files, you should eventually have a look at the Apple ScriptEditor instead - it also has a dictionary viewer.

Regarding the second question (plan on adding actions?) there are actually two kinds of action within InDesign - menu actions and a small and very old subsystem that supports "transform again". Neither of them are recordable (into script or proprietary file) though - UI interaction is translated into lower level "commands" (as seen in undo history) rather than scripting equivalent structures (AppleEvent, ScriptRequestData) and for performance reasons we can be glad for that. For completeness sake the plugin SDK also has a plugin for automated tests "AAT", but I never got beyond having a few looks at the documentation.

TerreSpencer said:

ESTK's OMV is the only resource that shows the properties of scriptable plug-ins.

Hi Terre,

if that's the case and you cannot inspect the resources with the VSCode plugin, then yes, you have to stay with Mojave.

It seems that the VSCode plugin currently is no full substitution of the ESTK.

Or you can switch operating systems and work with Windows 10 where the ESTK is still running together with e.g. CC 2019 software.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

A new version of Extendscript is not in work as per the latest information i have. Catalina has dropped support for 32 bit apps and Extendscript is 32 bit so it would not work on it. However Adobe is has created(actively being developed) a VSCode plugin that helps debug the scripts, you can give it a try. Look at the following link for details

https://medium.com/adobetech/the-future-of-extendscript-development-a-vscode-plugin-2d8d0172a357

Also as far as i know there is no plan as such to drop the support for scripting in InDesign, it is here to stay for the foreseeable future so you can keep using it for your projects without any worry for now

-Manan