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Promotional graphic with photo of Peter Kahrel, Typefi Senior Scripting Engineer, above a white logo for Typefi, and the title of the blog post.

Automate repetitive graphs and charts in InDesign with scripting

Peter Kahrel
Senior Scripting Engineer, Typefi

The adage ‘work smarter, not harder’ often comes to mind when composing documents. Thankfully, scripting can help save the day, as Typefi Senior Scripting Engineer, Peter Kahrel, explains.

Charts in Adobe InDesign are usually produced as separate files and placed in an InDesign document as images. These charts can be high-quality PDF or EPS files, but more often than not they are medium- to low-quality bitmaps.
Abstract image of overlaid bar charts and line graphs.

Many charts are also repetitive. For example, a financial data sheet that’s published every day or every week can contain one or more charts that are always the same apart from the height of bars (in a bar chart) or the way a line is drawn (in a line chart).

Accelerate styling with Typefi Writer 64-bit edition!

Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Typefi Writer 8.7.0 for the 64-bit version of Microsoft Word!

More than two years in the making, our engineering team has completely rewritten this version of Typefi Writer from the ground up to be compatible with modern 64-bit applications.

As the tech industry moves towards universal adoption of 64-bit processing, this update brings Typefi Writer into line with current technology and offers a level of future-proofing for Typefi Writer publishing workflows.

Typefi Writer users will feel right at home, as the 64-bit edition offers the same user interface as Typefi Writer 8.7.0 for the 32-bit version of Word, with the addition of one major new feature—floating style panels.

A composite image of Typefi team members at work.

Happy 20th birthday, InDesign!

10 Typefi team members lay out their InDesign memories and tips.

Morgaine Auton
Marketing Assistant, Typefi

1999 was a big year. President Clinton was acquitted, The Matrix premiered in cinemas across the globe, Napster pioneered peer-to-peer file sharing, and the Y2K bug was still capturing the public zeitgeist.

Perhaps most significantly for us here at Typefi, and for many people working in publishing around the world, the first version of Adobe InDesign was released in August of that year.

A delicious-looking cupcake with white icing and a black square decoration on top in the shape of the InDesign logo. The words '20 years' are written on the bottom of the logo. There is a pile of mixed nuts on the plate next to the cupcake.
Birthday cupcakes at CreativePro Week 2019.

Called InDesign 1.0, the 1999 version was created as a replacement for Adobe’s retiring desktop software, Adobe PageMaker, which was struggling to compete with QuarkXPress, the leading desktop publishing software at the time.

The release of the OS X compatible InDesign 2.0 in 2002 made it the first desktop publishing software in the space, helping cinch its position as an industry standard amongst Apple users in the creative industries.

Unprettify CXML code in Oxygen XML Editor

Peter Kahrel
Scripting Engineer, Typefi

XML and CXML code, when seen as one long string, is pretty unintelligible.

In Oxygen XML Editor you can make that code readable by prettifying it (Oxygen calls it ‘Format and indent’). That’s very useful, but the problem is that because of whitespace issues you can’t edit the code, save it, and use it in a Typefi job.

To use a formatted and edited CXML file in a Typefi job, you’d have to unprettify it to remove all the indents and line breaks. But, strangely, Oxygen doesn’t have such a function. However, you can unprettify prettified code with a simple find-and-replace operation.