InDesign Script to create custom sized pages from data

[Nouku77]

Hi there,

Looking for some help writing a script for use in InDesign. I have very little knowledge on how to write a script for InDesign but love using them! So any help would be AWESOME!

Problem:

We receive Excel sheets from Media companies containing a list of sizes (i.e for billboards - 576x28,600x920,750x360...) to be created. Currently I create an InDesign document, add pages and manually change each page size to suite the list, create the layouts and output files.

To make exporting faster I use a script called ‘Export-named-pages’. “The script determines file names for each page from the content, and exports images or PDFs. The result is uniquely named files of each page.”

Script Solution:

I’m after a script for InDesign (currently running 18.3) that will either create a document with custom sized pages from the supplied data - OR - change a pages size depending on the information supplied. Potentially from an excel sheet with a column of sizes WxH - OR - from text on a page in InDesign (after a quick data merge of sizes from supplied data).

Hopefully I have explained my self well enough 😐

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Manan Joshi]

Have a look at the following discussions

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/is-it-possible-to-change-the-page-size-of-a-page...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/js-how-to-set-page-size/m-p/8725595#M31862

The first script shows how to change the size for a single page and the second one shows how to do it for all the pages in the document except parent pages.

-Manan

[Nouku77]

Thanks for the info Manan. I'll take a look. Hopefully I can make sense of it all 🙂

[Manan Joshi]

It should be pretty straightforward. You can search the forum for samples to read a file as well. Try to play around, you will learn something, if you get stuck let us know what you came up with and we shall try to help you.

-Manan 

[Nouku77 · Accepted solution]

Well... I ended up in the weeds chasing my tail.... BUT William Campbell had a script ready to go. See below.
https://www.marspremedia.com/software/indesign/pages-from-csv

[Manan Joshi]

Great that you found a script that could work for you. I would still suggest that you give the script a read along with the posts I shared and try to make sense out of it. Once you get a hang of it, you should be better placed the next time a need for a new script comes up.

-Manan

[Nouku77]

Hi Manan. A lot to get hang of but you are indeed correct. Now on to my next script adding text boxes withpage sizes above all the pages ... So far it works well (in part thanks to chatGPT) with a little quirk of some numbers rounding up wrong... 🙂 Baby steps 🙂