I’m excited to announce a major new update to Footwork – the InDesign add-on for creating multi-column and run-on footnotes. Version 3 introduces three important new features: I. Full support for endnotes-as-footnotes. A new option, “Detach as endnotes” can be found...

How to split a table in InDesign? There is no simple way to split a table in InDesign! By splitting a table, I mean dividing it into two tables. Say you have a table with 1000 rows. You want to...

Extract Pages has just received an important bug fix. Bug Description If “Split by Paragraph Style” is chosen, the first file created includes all pages from the start of the document up to and including the first instance of the...

Extract Pages, the InDesign add-on that makes it easy to generate small InDesign files from one big one, as well as export multiple PDFs, JPGs, PNGs, and more, has been updated to version 2.0. Version 2.0 comes with a number...

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Dropword III – the InDesign script for creating whole-word dropcaps (essential for traditional Hebrew typography) has been updated to version 3.5.3. Occasionally, Dropword did not correctly create a gap under the first word of the paragraph. This occurred when the...

New InDesign Script: Fit Page to Selection...

Hyperlink Pro has been updated to version 2.1.6. This fixes a bug: If a hyperlink in the document was immediately followed by a footnote reference or anchored object marker, the footnote or anchored object would be deleted. Additionally, Hyperlink Pro...

There have been updates to many Id-Extras add-ons recently. In most cases, emails were sent out to anyone who had purchased the product in question, but not always. And since January there has been no “Script Update News” on the...

Change Consecutive Paragraphs Pro Two small, but important, fixes are available in the latest update (version 2.1.1) to Change Consecutive Paragraphs Pro, the InDesign script that makes document formatting a doddle! The batch-editor has now been updated to work with...

FormMaker makes it easy to create rich, interactive PDF forms in InDesign. It fills the huge gaps left in InDesign’s interactive PDF forms capabilities, allowing you to set text alignment in form fields, as well as set the text color, add...

There is now a new forum for Id-Extras product help: http://id-extras.com/forum/index.php A link to the forum is also available in the main menu bar above. I’m keeping it simple for now – just one forum for all product questions and...

FormMagic has been updated to version 2.0.0. New features include: Field rotation. Acrobat has four rotation options for form fields (0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees). Until now, it was not possible to rotate fields with FormMagic. But with the...

Extract Pages has been updated to version 1.7.2. This version fixes a bug: If PDF export is chosen, and the option to export groups of pages is selected, and a PDF file with the same name already exists in the...

FormMaker makes it easy to create rich, interactive PDF forms in InDesign. It fills the huge gaps left in InDesign’s interactive PDF forms capabilities, allowing you to set text alignment in form fields, as well as set the text color,...

Grep to Anchored Object has been updated to version 2.5.5. New features and bug fixes include: A new option to anchor the object to the start of the current paragraph, so now there are 3 anchoring options: (1) To the...

Extract Pages has been updated to version 1.7.0. As well as breaking up large InDesign files into smaller files, with the new version you can now output not only PDFs but also PNGs, JPEGs and interactive PDFs! All the powerful...

InDesign makes it surprisingly difficult to break the link between two text frames without otherwise modifying the layout. The official way of breaking the thread between frames is to click the in-port or out-port of a text frame, and then...

Display Line Numbers – the popular line numbering add-on for Adobe InDesign – has now been updated to version 4.1.0. Version 4.1.0 includes: Full support for text frames containing endnotes. Bug fix for InDesign 2020: Owing to an Adobe bug,...

If you find the new Adobe Forums design incredibly wasteful with screen real estate, you’re not alone! Here’s what it looks like to date:     I played around with the CSS a little, and created instead a “compact” version....

Adobe removed the old “layout adjustment” feature from InDesign 2019 and replaced it with the new “adjust layout” feature. Yes, that’s as confusing as it sounds. I guess their idea was that the new feature is a replacement for the...

QuickResize is the InDesign script that adjusts and resizes your layout to whatever new size (dimensions can be specified in cm, mm, inches, point, picas) or percentage of the old size desired. No “artificial intelligence” is used in the process...

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After a long wait, the latest version of InDesign, 2019, has finally introduced the ability to select a font for interactive PDF form fields. Until today, interactive form fields created in InDesign would always be set to Times Roman when...

The new release of InDesign, 2019, is here with some great new features. But there is one change that may be unwanted. The new InDesign comes with a new internal serial number. Since 2012, every Creative Cloud version of InDesign...

In this month’s Script Update News I’m covering recent updates to three of our popular scripts: Line Numbers (a golden oldie, but still going strong), Extract Pages (major update here), and Hyperlink Pro (a couple of great new features). Line...

There’s a thirst and a hunger out there, folks – not for bread and not for water, but for InDesign scripts! Savvy InDesign users can’t seem to get enough of them, and you know what? They are 100% right. If you...

I just updated the HTML Import script. It is now much faster and more reliable, and should be successful with more websites. Initially, the script didn’t get much traction, but in the last few months I’ve noticed more people trying...

A free InDesign script to generate a list of all languages in use in a document In InDesign, text has a language attribute. This means that all text in InDesign is defined as being a certain language – one of...

A new version of the Change Consecutive Paragraphs Pro has been released, with an emphasis on making it easier to construct batches. Thanks to Raphaël Freeman of Renana Typesetting for suggesting many of these ideas! With version 2.0.5: The Batch Editor remembers...

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A common scenario is described in the following email: Help! My old PC has been replaced/sold/crashed/lost/stolen. I’ve reinstalled InDesign on my new PC/Mac, but when I try to activate the Id-Extras InDesign add-on, I get an error message saying: “This serial...

InDesign is usually pretty well-behaved about applying the specified paragraph style to footnotes in a document. By “well-behaved,” I mean that InDesign seems to respect the setting in the Footnote Options dialog that specifies the paragraph style to use for...

A new version of Hyperlink Pro has been released. Version 2.0.3 includes an important fix: Previously, if Hyperlink Pro was run twice on the same text, the URL (the actual web address associated with the hyperlink) would include the discretionary...

You may sometimes notice that FormMagic converts Arial to Helvetica, and sometimes it doesn’t. In this blog post, I will try to explain what’s going on and how to get predictable results. FormMagic can create regular text fields, and rich-text...

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While working on a book in InDesign recently, I needed to switch the position of two paragraphs throughout the 400-page book. There were 2 paragraph styles involved: A “Quote” style, and a “Source” style. In the book as I had...

Contents Introduction Basic Custom File Naming Overwriting Existing Files Advanced Custom File Naming First Page <fp> and <+fp> Last Page <lp> and <+lp> File Name <fn> Counter # Conditional Text […] Section Marker <sm> Alternate Layout Name <alt> Paragraph Style...

Here’s a little routine that will paste text in a more expected way than InDesign handles it. Fuller explanation to come, time permitting, but check out the link to the Adobe Forums below to understand the issue. This script was...

InDesign forces designers to set the page margins by number only. You have to open the Margins and Columns dialog, and type in the distance of the margin from the top, left, bottom, and right of the page. This is...

The Problem: I ran into the following known bug/difficulty recently, when laying out a graphic-rich book in InDesign. The book had many photos with captions, and I had grouped the photos and the captions together. But now, after the photos...

Have you always wished that the quick-apply feature would respect your paragraph style’s Next Style setting? Have you always wished that there would be an easy shortcut for Next Style? Well, now there is! This free script emulates a simple...

Over on the Adobe InDesign Scripting Forum, Bob Levine asked: I have a client in need of a script to print every nth page in an InDesign book. The book could be more than 20,000 pages so manually entering page...

Using FormMagic or FormMaker is a 2-step process. First, FormMagic must be run on the InDesign file. Then, it must be run again in Acrobat on the resulting interactive PDF. In this post, I will show how to create an action in Acrobat...

With FormMaker, not only is it possible to produce fully-formatted Acrobat forms in InDesign as with FormMagic, it is even possible to attach Acrobat validation, calculation, and formatting scripts to each form field right inside InDesign. You can also add document...

If you’ve ever been frustrated at having to hunt down your favorite Id-Extras add-on or script in InDesign’s script panel – and if, like me, you’ve got dozens of scripts in there – here’s some good news! Id-Extras products can now be...

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In this post, I will show one way of forcing InDesign to avoid runts in paragraphs. First, though, let me clarify what I mean by runt. Runts A runt in a typographic context refers to a short last line of a paragraph. This...

July 2018 UPDATE: If you’re looking to export multiple PDFs, using multiple PDF export presets, into multiple folders, using super-flexible filenaming options (including filenames based on the contents of the page itself), our newly updated Extract Pages script is for you!...

The latest version of Auto Char Styles – version 2.2 – has just been released. Auto Char Styles is a great InDesign add-on that solves a basic InDesign need: Applying a character style to all text overrides in an InDesign document. Marking...

Italic-formatted text followed by roman (upright, regular) text can cause typographic problems: the leaning italic letters collide with the upright roman in front. Italic f is particularly problematic, especially as the last letter in a parenthetical comment (what if) where it...

The following script is a short and sweet way of moving all text in an InDesign anchored object out of its little cage and into the main text flow of the document. If you have an InDesign document peppered with...

Word has a nice feature that lets you select some text and press Shift+F3 to cycle between all the available capitalization modes: so you cycle through the options like this: cycle > Cycle > CYCLE > cycle just by pressing...

When converting a print book to reflowable ePub in InDesign, I always use the Custom CSS option, available in InDesign’s ePub export dialog. Adding an external, custom CSS file makes it easy (where possible) to tweak the final output to...

This is something that has bugged me often with InDesign. Although InDesign has a way of setting an object style to be “default” (in the object styles panel just drag the [T] to your preferred default style), that default setting...

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LiveIndex is a great script for converting the page references in the index of a book into interactive hyperlinks. It is particularly useful when a professional index has been made for the book, rather than relying on InDesign’s built-in indexing feature,...

I’ve taken advantage of the past week to update four scripts in the Id-Extras.com library: Auto Character Styles, Line Numbers, Sections Stuff, and Fit Text to Frame, this last one being the biggest update of the four, and in fact...

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Every so often, the question is raised how to add delimiters (commas, or thin spaces, etc.) between groups of 3 digits in long numbers in InDesign. It would seem like this is something a clever GREP search could do, but in...

Many of the posts on this blog include fully-functional sample scripts. To use these sample scripts, you must copy–paste them into a text editor such as Notepad (not into a word processor!) and then save them with a .jsx extension. The...

A few weeks ago on the Adobe InDesign scripting forum, InDesign Guru AnneMarie Concepcion asked for a script that would allow the user to select a bunch of files and automatically place them inside an InDesign document, one after the other:...

If you need to save an InDesign document as separate pages or separate spreads, Extract Pages is for you. Tested on Windows and Mac, works on CS6 upwards. (The main product page for this script is here.) Specify multiple ranges, and save as...

I was recently needing a way to clear all overrides in a 100+ page book. The book was divided into many separate stories, so it was not possible to simply “select all” and click on the “Clear overrides” button. Instead...

If you’re a guest at someone’s house, wouldn’t you agree that it is bad manners to leave a mess behind you when you go? Likewise, when a user runs your script, I’m sure you’d agree that the user shouldn’t have...

If you’re converting print publications to ePubs, you’ve probably come across this problem: The print publication typesetter (or compositor, as they are also called) has used InDesign’s all-caps text property for some paragraph styles. For instance, the chapter headings may...

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JavaScript’s Date object can be a difficult beast to tame. In terms of the number of properties and methods it has, it must be one of the largest core JavaScript classes out there. However, using it requires some careful thinking,...

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