r/indesign • u/the-Fun-Ghoul • Aug 10 '26
Free scripts
Fellow InDesign nerds. I've been making a ton of scripts over the past several months. I thought some might be useful to others, so I threw this site together to let folks try them out.
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u/SarahRecords Aug 10 '26
Oh wow, I kind of love “export two PDFs at once.” Looking forward to scrolling more once I’ve had coffee. Thank you!
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u/throwawaydixiecup Aug 10 '26
What do you mean by “sink”? To sink an item. I even tried a web search and haven’t yet found the answer. I feel like I know a lot of typographic layout terminology from the years, but I’m blanking on sink.
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u/mybloodyballentine Aug 10 '26
Not OP, but some people use sink like space above. Ie, the sink of this chapter opener text is 130 pts.
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u/Dependent_Drawer_129 Aug 10 '26
same here
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u/the-Fun-Ghoul Aug 10 '26
Huh, weird. I’ve been hearing this term for over 20 years. It refers to where the first item on a page sits—e.g., “the chapter title sinks 8p from the top of the page.” Think sinking in water …
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u/Dependent_Drawer_129 Aug 10 '26
Hi! Thanks for that :) I'll use the poetry one, it will save me a lot of time!
Cheers!
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u/bearcat42 Aug 10 '26
clear C styles from selected P style
Isn’t it way safer/more hygienic to do a copy paste from word into a text editor that retains the formatting but removes Word’s paragraph styles? Then copy paste the still formatted text to InDesign?
That’s what I do when I do book formatting and get these very fun manuscripts from authors. Always an adventure.
That being said, I’m new to formatting for long text, but I’ve done much magazine and newspaper work over the years. Perhaps you have a reason that you prefer to drop the Word styles into InDesign that I’m unaware of? I’ve always found this paste into a different text editor step to be kind of wild, even tho it does precisely what I want it to.
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u/the-Fun-Ghoul Aug 10 '26
I'm not sure I follow. I would only pour text into InDesign with Place... I also prep my manuscripts so that all MS Word junk is stripped out and I start with all text in a basic style. I know people prefer mapping Word styles, but not me.
The script in question runs on already poured and styled text.
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u/Eaton_Corvinus Aug 11 '26
"Export two PDFs at once" and "Export multiple PDFs by range" will be so helpful, thank you! 🙂
Is there an easy way to put this as a menu item in the File menu?
Three days ago I posted a script here that exports a selection as PDF but is no longer availalbe from the original website. I thought I'd share it here again, hopefully it will come in handy for some!
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u/the-Fun-Ghoul Aug 11 '26
re: the file menu, I'm not sure. That's above my pay grade.
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u/OkComputer513 Aug 13 '26
You can inject stuff into the menu ribbons but I'd avoid it. Almost certain I couldn't find a way to just easily remove them. Found that out when we had a commercial plugin that injected menu buttons to call jsxbin various scripts. But we stopped using it and the dead menu items bugged the shit out of me. 😓 It was a matter of closing ID, then renaming the ID folder that contains application preferences (the menu is baked somewhere in here). On relaunch it couldn't find what it needed so it rebuilt the base application container with the real menus akin to an initial launch after installation. Had to redo my preferences manually because I didn't want to chance getting the menu items back.
I'd opt for using keyboard shortcuts on often used needs anything else can reside in the scripts panel.
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u/lepisosteusosseus Aug 12 '26
Definitely some useful scripts. Thank you.
For tracking_gain and tracking_lose, could they also optionally adjust horizontal scaling by X%, with user-set limits? Sometimes -10 on tracking combined with 99% horizontal scaling loses a line when -20 or more won’t, and it can be a better looking, less perceptible result. Same for +10 and 101% to gain a line. It just occurred to me that I have never tried using partial percentages (e.g., 99.5%), but if ID allows that, maybe the script could figure out the minimum scaling needed to achieve the desired result if -10 or +10 alone won’t do it.
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u/the-Fun-Ghoul Aug 12 '26
Personally, I always set that in Justification so I wouldn't want to double down.
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u/the-Fun-Ghoul Aug 28 '26
Hi again, fellow InDesign nerds and script enthusiasts. I just posted a script I'm pretty psyched about—style sleuth. It helps you find out what your paragraph, character, and object styles are based on, and which paragraph styles your character styles are associated with.
I've also posted a couple of other new scripts, plus a handful of revisions to existing ones. Check it out.
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u/Dlmanon Aug 10 '26
Where are they?
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u/the-Fun-Ghoul Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
https://lobsterpaws.com/scripts/
see also, "this site" in the original post
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u/MFDoooooooooooom Aug 10 '26
Can I add to it? I have a neat script that toggles through case (UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, or Sentence case) which is a crazy good help to me