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This movie is just an orientation to working with some of the scripts that we will be using
throughout this title. If you are working on a Mac, you can use AppleScript
scripts, on Windows, VBScript, but JavaScripts are cross-platform.
So wherever possible we are going to be using scripts that have been written in JavaScript.
So the first question is where do these scripts come from?
Now we could if we were brave and we knew about scripting right our own.
I'm not especially brave and I don't really know anything about scripting beyond the basics.
So we are not going to be doing that but we are going to be downloading or I'm going to
point you to where you can download some very useful
scripts that some wonderful, kind-hearted people
out there have created and made available for our use.
Here are some of the websites where you can get scripts from.
I'm just going to go and take a look at the Adobe Exchange website and here if I - I'm
at the Adobe Exchange beta site. I can click on InDesign and there we have
a list of available not only scripts but also templates and tutorials
and most of them are free, some of them cost but most of them are free.
There are very, very specific, but if that specific thing is something that you want
to do, these scripts can be heaven sent. Now, when you download a script, where do
you put them? Well, there are a couple of places that you
can put them and they will work. But the easiest place is to put them in the
InDesign folder in the Scripts folder, in the Scripts panel folder.
So let's just take a look what I mean by that. On my Desktop, I'm going to double click on
my hard drive icon and then I'm going to go to Applications
and to my InDesign CS3 folder, to my Script folder and my Scripts panel folder.
Now that's where I want to my scripts to go. If you are going to be working with a lot
of scripts, it can make sense to make an alias or a shortcut
to this folder and that's what I'm going to do here.
In fact that's what I have done right there by coming to the File menu and choosing Make
Alias and then dragging that alias on to the Desktop.
Then when I download a script I can just drag the script into that folder.
Once a script has been installed where you will find it is under the Window menu, on
the Automation flyout, in the Scripts panel.
InDesign comes with many wonderful sample scripts and they are in the Samples folder.
Scripts that I have added are going to be outside of the Samples folder.
But depending on exactly where you put your scripts they may be in the User folder.
In my case they are at the first level of the Scripts panel folder.
To run a script, and I'm just going to draw a rectangle right there and I'm going to use
this one, AddGuides, to add some guides around this selected item.
To run a script you simply double click on it and depending on the script itself you
may get a dialog box giving you options or it may just perform the thing that it does
and in that case we get guides around that object.
Now, of course, we can't always be sure of where these scripts have come from,
how safe they are to use. So this is in some ways a disclaimer that
you need to tread warily at least at first with scripts
and because any script may perform a series of steps that could be a very long series
of steps, it may not always be possible to undo to the point where you were before
you ran the script, if you don't like what the script gave you.
So in that case to be safe always make sure that you save your document before you run
the script, then should things go wrong, you can revert
to your last save. One other thing and that is that with the
advent of CS3, scripts that were written for InDesign CS and CS2 no longer work.
There is a workaround that will allow us to use older non-compatible CS3 scripts in CS3
and this is the workaround and it works most of the time.
In the aforementioned Scripts panel we want to make a folder called Version 4.0 Scripts-
make sure that that's exactly what it's called- and
put all of your older scripts into that folder and hopefully they should work,
but do make sure that you save your document before you run the script.
That's it for our overview. Let's roll up our sleeves and get working
with InDesign.