Adobe InDesign Automation: Nonfiction Publishing via JavaScript

Adobe InDesign Automation of Nonfiction Books via JavaScript Book Save buckets full of money by automating InDesign's time-consuming tasks.

Acquire the know-how to convert a nonfiction book manuscript into a practically ready-to-publish book via JavaScript automation. Save hundreds of hours by automating indexes, cross-references, footnotes, image processing, top-of-page inserts, new chapter pages, drop-caps, blank pages, and other repetitive time-consuming tasks. Discover InDesign plugins and how to create, run, and debug them. Free the author from InDesign cost constraints when it comes to inserting images, cross-references, indexes, and footnotes. Use HTML-like tags to define indexes, cross-references, footnotes, image locations, captions. Use regular expressions to transform these into live InDesign items. Use the Adobe InDesign-specific JavaScript IDEs: ESTK (ExtendScript Toolkit) and the VS Code / InDesign UDT (UXP Developer Tool) tandem. Overcome the traps and pitfalls encountered upon importing a Word manuscript into InDesign. Learn the five skills you'll need to automate InDesign: Using InDesign. Learning JavaScript to program InDesign. Discovering how to find the InDesign DOM (Document Object Model) classes you will need. Getting a firm hold on the two InDesign tools, ESTK and UDT. Mastering regular expressions. Source code and explanations on how to automate fourteen InDesign time-consuming tasks are provided. Corresponding plugins are available via the Adobe Marketplace. The following InDesign plugins are provided:

DocStats provides document metrics. UserData manages built-in data used by various plugins. BadTags detects malformed tags, thereby reducing proofreading time. Cross-References creates X-refs from tags. Indexes — If it is in the book, you should find it through the index table . Convert index tags into indexes. Footnotes creates footnotes from tags.. ImageProcessing adds captions to images and positions them. TopOfPage Inserts places page number, chapter, and last section seen. BlankPages adds text informing the reader that the page is intentionally blank. ChapterTitles spreads numbered chapter titles into two lines. FirstParagraphs automatically sets new chapter first paragraphs with a leading drop-cap. DoAll runs all tasks sequentially. TagRemnants detects leftover HTML-like parts and pieces. PostProcess standardizes font size of items in footnotes, sets colors on automation tags to blue and relinks images. This book explains how to cost-effectively convert a Word manuscript into a ready-to-publish nonfiction book via InDesign JavaScript automation. It provides the programmer with the know-how to create InDesign automation plugins , namely:

Recognize labor intensive InDesign tasks. Learn enough InDesign to understand what needs to be done to accomplish objectives. Learn enough JavaScript to get the job done. Master the DOM (Document Object Model) classes sufficiently to automate InDesign tasks. Use the Adobe tools to manage scripts and/or plugins: ESTK (ExtendScript Toolkit) and UDT (UXP Developer Tool). Learn why VS Code is best tool to edit JavaScript. Learn how to create regular expressions to process HTML-like tags. Finally, get the source code to create your own plugins. The book's objective is that a programmer should find everything needed to automate InDesign within the context of nonfiction books.