Locating Your InDesign Serial Number

Kelly Vaughn

25

If you’ve been designing for a while, chances are good that you have multiple versions of InDesign installed on your computers. With laptops, desktops, and multiple people in a workgroup, it’s easy to lose track of which serial number corresponds to which InDesign version on which computer. While it would be an excellent idea to keep track of this information in a spreadsheet, I admit that when I get a new version of InDesign, I throw caution to the wind, and install it as quickly as possible, giving no regard for keeping track of the serial number. But sometimes, we need to know which serial number is installed where.

Recently on Twitter, Jean-Claude Tremblay posed the question: “How can you find which Adobe serial number is installed on a multi-computer setup?”

Rorohiko to the rescue! The wonderful Kris Coppieters wrote a short script for locating a serial number within InDesign. The script is only one line long. Make a new plain text file. (It needs to be text-only; no formatting!) Copy and paste this text into your new text file.

alert(app.serialNumber);

Name the file “serial.jsx” (make sure it does not have .txt at the end), and put it in the InDesign scripts folder. (For more on where and how to install scripts, see this article.)

Run the script, and you’ll get a simple dialog box containing your InDesign serial number.

Note the difference between the serial number (20 digits) and the activation code (24 digits). The serial number is the first 20 digits of the activation code.  The last 4 digits are kept “secret,” and only known to the purchaser.

Thanks again to Kris from Rorohiko, who supports our InDesign community in so many ways!