Adobe InDesign Scripting Language Reference

[chrisnaylor]

Does anyone know of an Adobe InDesign scripting language reference of any sort?

The only documentation appears to be such items as the Scripting Tutorials and the Scripting Guide, both of which are fairly useful to get started, but what's really needed is a definitive reference volume or at, least, a Help system.

Otherwise, unless the areas you're interested in are mentioned in the Tutorials or Guide, you're pretty well reduced to guessing.

[Manan Joshi]

For DOM documentation see the following

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#Application.html

-Manan

[chrisnaylor]

Many thanks for your posting - that's just the sort of information I need!

[Jongware]

Do note that Gregor's site is generated from the same data file as Adobe's own Extendscript Toolkit Editor uses. That data file itself is generated by InDesign; it goes over all of its installed plugins and gathers available scripting information into this single large file.

So if you have a working ESTK (currently not a solid fact anymore), you can also look up anything through the menu Help > Object Model Viewer. But because that viewer is ... not very intuitive to use, most people prefer Gregor's infinitely more accessible on-line version.

The very one single caveat of the on-line version is that if you have a scriptable third party plugin installed, InDesign will happily regenerate its local Help file to include the data from that plugin, and you can find in your own local ESTK -- but of course not in Gregor's data.

[chrisnaylor]

Many thanks for your posting - that was very helpful.

The fact is, I had completely overlooked Adobe's Extendscript Toolkit - so, you can see how often I use InDesign scripting!

Having tried it, I found there was a problem with the Object Model Viewer inasmuch as, whenever I try to set it to Adobe InDesign, I get a message saying that Adobe InDesign must be running to load the object model, followed by a message saying:

"Cannot launch target Adobe InDesign CS5!"

I get this message whether InDesign is running at the time or not.

The object model viewer seems to work ok with the other applications in Master Collection - Illustrator, Photoshop, etc - so I can't quite see why it's giving problems with InDesign.

Just a later addendum to the above reply:

I've traced the problen with ESTK being unable to start InDesign - it's because I had the Properties of the InDesign executable set to Run as Administrator but didn't have the same Property value set for ESTK.

With them both set to Run As Administrator, ESTK starts and loads the Object Model for InDesign without any trouble.

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

there is a book by Gregor Fellenz in German that is reviewed by Marc Autret in English:

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2015/12/indesign-automatisieren-scripting-bible-in-german

Marc Autret's website is a very useful source of information:

https://www.indiscripts.com/

If you want to know how things are organized in a document from the geometric side Marc did this:

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2018/06/coordinate-spaces-and-transformations-5

Marc said: "Six years! It tooks me six years to document the fundamentals of InDesign “Coordinate Spaces and Transformations.” You may think I am sluggishly slow—which is a sensible diagnosis!—but the topic required a true immersion to be both experimented and covered."

Well, nothing can be more true than that!

Must reads from the same website:

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2010/06/on-everyitem-part-1

https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2010/07/on-everyitem-part-2

Well, check that all out yourself…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[chrisnaylor]

Many thanks for your posting - that book looks as if it would be very useful, if only it was in English!

I appreciate the trouble you have gone to in providing these links to useful information.