The InDesign Scriptopedia

Erica Gamet

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Erica Gamet brings together a collection of some of the coolest and most useful InDesign scripts.

This article appeared in Issue 88 of InDesign Magazine.

If you spend any time reading InDesign Magazine, visiting InDesignSecrets, or attending live events like The InDesign Conference, you’ll quickly notice how many folks consider scripts to be indispensable tools in their workflows. But if you’ve never actually used scripts, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Can scripts really make that much of a difference? Can you use scripts without knowing how to script? Can you actually find scripts for the specific tasks that you need to accomplish? My short answer: yes, yes, and yes! But if you still think, “Meh, scripts aren’t for me,” consider the following:

• If you find yourself repeatedly choosing the same menu functions in InDesign over and over…you might need a script.
• If you constantly enter the same values in a dialog box…you might need a script.
• If you need to access some obscure functionality in InDesign…you might need a script.
• If you just want to get your work done faster…you really ought to use a script.

Truly, any time you need to automate some task in InDesign (or if InDesign doesn’t natively offer a function you need) someone might have already written a script that will get the job done for you.

But where do you go to find InDesign scripts? Of course, you can Google the phrase of whatever you’re hoping to accomplish plus the words “InDesign script,” and you might get lucky. Or you might end up spending a lot of time poking around various sites before you find what you’re looking for. But the whole idea of using scripts is to stop you from fumbling around and wasting time. That’s why the editors of this magazine came up with the idea to create an amazing new resource: the most complete and up-to-date reference guide to InDesign scripts in the world! They call it The InDesign Script-o-pedia, and this eponymous article is the first step in the effort to build out that amazing resource, which will be available at InDesignSecrets.

While this list of scripts (organized into nine categories) barely scratches the surface of what The InDesign Script-o-pedia will ultimately become, it’s a solid foundation, as well as an eye-opening testament to what you can achieve when you harness the power of scripts in InDesign.