Why isn't this script for drawing guides

[dane13860245]

Frequently I use nice neat guides for laying out objects and text in my InDesign document.

So, I thought I might create a simple script that would draw guides on my actively selected page of my InDesign file in certain proportions.

But it's not working! I don't know exactly why other than that I'm pretty sure I didn't call the active page width and height correctly. It's important that this script is generated on whatever the "active" page is, because it could be any page of a document, and different pages might use different proportions for laying things out, like 20% of the document's height at a time.

Here's part of a script for attempting to draw those guides

var docWidth = Number(app.activeWindow.activePage.pageWidth);

var docHeight = Number(app.activeWindow.activePage.pageHeight);

// guide test

for (var i = 0; i<6;++i){

        app.activeWindow.activePage.guides.add({location: docWidth*i*0.2, orientation: HorizontalOrVertical.VERTICAL});

}

myWindow.show();

This is the only component of my script that doesn't work. And it probably doesn't work because I didn't correctly call the actively selected page width and height, so how do I do that?

[rob day]

Hi @dane13860245 , A page doesn’t have a pageWidth property. You can get the document’s default pagewidth with this:

doc.documentPreferences.pageWidth

But the activePage could have a custom size so get the width from the page.bounds property:

var doc = app.activeDocument;
//var pw = doc.documentPreferences.pageWidth
var ap = app.activeWindow.activePage;
var b = ap.bounds;
var pw = b[3]-b[1]
for (var i = 0; i<6;++i){
    ap.guides.add({location: pw*i*0.2, orientation: HorizontalOrVertical.VERTICAL});
}

probably better 

[dane13860245]

Thank you for the reply!

What is the b[3] - b[1]? The brackets indicate an array of some sort, but I'm just looking to be able to select any page at any time and apply the script.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Bounds - same as GeometricBounds for objects. 

[top, left, bottom, right]

[0,1,2,3]

[rob day]

If you know none of the pages have been resized, you could set the pw variable to the document’s documentPreferences pageWidth property, but the page itself doesn’t have a pageWidth property which is why your script throws an error. Getting the width from the .bounds property is just safer.