Plug In Development Documentation

[cliffc77641705]

I am researching the possibility of developing a Plug In for InDesign and I have 4 questions:-

- all the documentation I have downloaded so far is many years old (e.g. 2012) is this typical of Adobe docs?

- if the documentation is generally this old, is this an issue with regards to being up to date?

- anyone aware of the ability to use C# as the underlying development base?

- if not can anyone provide useful links to C++ resources of any kind?

apologies for so many questions in one post.

thanks in advance

[Test Screen Name]

Plugins are written in C++ only. It is best for this not to be your first C++ project. 

[cliffc77641705]

Thanks TSN,

I haven't used C++ for many years so a little bit of catchining up to do.

thanks for the clarification

[Manan Joshi · Accepted solution]

Hi @cliffc77641705,

The only available documentation is shipped with the SDK which can be downloaded from the following website

https://console.adobe.io/servicesandapis

Look in the docs/html folder, it has a bunch of HTML files. Open any and look at the index at the left side where you would find links for

• Getting Started
• Plug-In Programming Guide I

• Plug-In Programming Guide II

These sections have very detailed description on the whole ecosystem of plugin development for InDesign using C++. Then there are other sections as well that deal with specific portions in detail like text, selection etc. Now regarding outdated sections of the documentation, basically most of the architecture has been the same since quite long so it all is relevant to the current version of the application as well. Generally the only things that changes across version updates is API changes, architecutral changes are rare.

Regarding development using C#, the API documentation is the same as that for VBScript, you can load the tlb file in a tlb viewer and browse it. You can also take help from JS API documentation which would be quite similiar to VBS. See the following

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/

I hope all this should be enough for you to get started.

-Manan

[cliffc77641705]

Thanks Manan Joshi for the very useful comments and links, certainly enough to get me started.

Good to know that the documentation has remained valid in architectural terms.

Cliff