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.
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).
At first glance, it may not look like much—but Peter Kahrel’s extensive online repository of free scripts is an essential resource for anyone who works on long documents in InDesign.
An online goldmine.
After hosting the script repository on his own website for many years, its future was in doubt late last year when Peter made the decision to relocate from the UK to Spain. His UK ISP refused to let him keep the site, or even set up redirection links.
Fortunately, David Blatner at CreativePro Network came to the rescue, and the repository now has a new home at CreativePro.com.
In this interview, Peter shares insights into the repository’s history, and some of the ways that InDesign typesetters can use his free scripts to make their lives easier.
In a Typefi workflow, if you want some text to automatically appear in a certain format in InDesign, you can apply that formatting as a local override or with a character style in your Word document, or encode it in an XML file.
This method of text formatting can’t be used in Typefi fields, because the composition engine doesn’t see that content. Typefi field content can contain only plain text: no formatting is possible.
However, this limitation can be overcome by including some rudimentary, HTML-like text tags in the field content and one or more GREP styles in the InDesign paragraph styles applied to the fields.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're OK with this, but you can opt out if you wish. AcceptRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
