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Looking to Create a Complex Script

Community Beginner ,
Jul 12, 2019 Jul 12, 2019

Good morning,

My name is David, and I am a Graphic Designer for Lifetouch, specializing in Production and Efficiency. I am currently looking at one of our most time consuming processes and attempting to streamline this process with the use of scripts within InDesign.

Currently, Lifetouch has over 95 versions of our school flyers, that are sent home with students every day, these flyers themselves are easy to send off to print, however we have another step for each flyer, a time-consuming, tedious process we call "Flyer Conversion", this process has the designer:

1. Group and select the envelope portion of page one, including imprint layers.

2. Change the document size (this size varies per flyer type, as some are sized differently, or contain two envelopes, however, typically there are 15-25 flyers of each size)

3. Move the grouped envelope contents to the opposite edge of the second page (back of flyer)

4. Save this file as a PDF with and without Imprint layers.

5. Save all files as JPEGs.

I recently was able to find an existing export script and modify it to help with the exporting of PDFs and layer versioning, and have an Acrobat action for copying out JPGs of the PDFs. Unfortunately, I have yet to discover a path to take to group the envelope contents, resize the file, and move the envelope contents to the oppose end of the reverse page. I firmly believe that automating this process would save an incredible amount of time per file, and make the process less tedious.

I wish InDesign had an actions panel!! But since we aren't there yet, any help anyone might have with starting to create a script for this process would be super helpful. I do have some knowledge of scripting and Javascript, though I am not entirely comfortable yet with it.

TOPICS
Scripting
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Community Expert ,
Jul 18, 2019 Jul 18, 2019

The people in this forum are always helpful when it comes to analysing a known script or known portion of a script and debugging it when a user is having issues with a script. Likewise, if there's a script that is likely to help the community as a whole, or it's felt that it should be shared, scripters may volunteer their skills to writing a script and submitting it in this forum or public domain.

That said, the script that you've described is a bespoke request and would arguably be a task that a scripter would be commissioned to write for a negotiated fee.

On that note, there may be snippets and portions of script on this site that could assist you. If you break your task down into even smaller bits, you may find the appropriate lines of code you need to at least stitch a smaller script (or scripts) together, and then if you can show us the lines that you have, then I feel it's likely that more scripters will be able to assist you with your task.

If the answer wasn't in my post, perhaps it might be on my blog at colecandoo!
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Explorer ,
Jul 18, 2019 Jul 18, 2019

Thanks for the reply. Personally, I am new to scripting in InDesign for the most part, though I have been able to prepare a script for the document size portion of the process from another script I found, as well as currently using an export with versioning script I tracked down as well. My long term goal is to completely automate this process for my team. Ideally I'd like to see the designer be able to pick a folder from a dialog and run a script in the background that completes the process for them.

One of my biggest goals however is to revitalize the conversation with Adobe around bringing an Actions panel to InDesign. If I had the same actions panel I have in Photoshop over in InDesign, this process would already be complete.

I've been hunting around the forums for scripts that could be useful, thanks for the idea of breaking it down into steps and stitching it all together. I'm sure I'll have a ton of questions at some point!

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Community Expert ,
Jul 18, 2019 Jul 18, 2019

Hi David,

maybe you are already using Peter Kahrel's script Batch-process:

Free script Batch convert/export InDesign documents | Peter Kahrel

You might have seen that this script allows to run ExtendScript code on opened documents.

Wouldn't that be a good starting point?

Regards,
Uwe

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Explorer ,
Jul 18, 2019 Jul 18, 2019

I am indeed using this script and have created documentation for my team to use this script for the proliferation of exported assets. Typically, for our Spring materials we export around 400 files, and for our Fall materials that number is around 1200 files. That script has saved us hours. Realistically, I'd like to add the change document size, and copy/paste of the envelope portion to this script, and long term have the existing dialog allow for the document size to be set as we have 5 different flyer sizes we work with.

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Community Expert ,
Jul 18, 2019 Jul 18, 2019
LATEST

Not to forget Kasyan Servetsky's script Batch Processor for running scripts on documents:

Batch processor

Regards,
Uwe

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