Science: It Works.

With a little help from some very nice people over on the Adobe Forums, some of yesterday's problems are now (mostly) solved.

Yes, there are issues with importing Word files into InDesign; both packages have suffered from feature creep over the last couple of versions, so the integration of file types only gets harder and harder.

But what really solved the issue was the appliance of old-style scientific trial and error. Going through the processes that InDesign automates by hand, and working out which one of them was causing the error. As it turns out, ID isn't keen on long footnotes which split across three or four pages (you know what? I'm not keen on them, either!) and as soon as that was taken out, everything worked perfectly.

Once again, the principle of working through a process and breaking it down into the most basic steps you can find to figure out what's going wrong gives results. Excellent. Now I can get back to what I was supposed to be doing, and automating as much of the typesetting as I can.

Consultations.

And, in a break from the (currently) personal projects, here's one that there's actual money in! I'm helping to upgrade my previous company from the Adobe Creative Suite 2 to the current version 5, which involves a whole load of bits and pieces, but one in particular is the updating of the scripts that I wrote to automatically import images into InDesign.

InDesign is a page layout application with a number of advantages.
- it is (relatively) cheap
- it is very powerful
- it has excellent integration with Adobe's other products (particularly PhotoShop and Illustrator)
- it has marvellous scripting support that lets you write scripts to make life just that little bit easier.

It's actually the inspiration behind my first ploddings into JavaScript - I had becoe tired of importing hundreds of images into a book, and decided that it would be much more efficient to have a script do it for me. With a little experimentation, I managed to knock something together that just about worked, and from then on I never really looked back.

So now I get to look back on my handiwork of several years ago with a newly-qualified and practiced eye, and think: "Good grief. Did I really think that this was sophisticated? Yikes!"

I mean, really. In answer to the question "How do I check if a number is odd or even?", I had used the solution: divide by two, convert to string, and search for ".5" within the string. Bad form, old chap, bad form indeed.

So I'm really rather looking forward to rewriting these, both from an efficiency standpoint and to try and make them that much more featured. Obviously, progress will be noted here (where else) as well as what I'm learning.

So far, what I've learned is that the scripting features in the later versions of the CS are massively more advanced that the ones that I was originally using. For a start, it has a complete package for helping to write scripts (though I'm not actually finding it as useful as, say, Eclipse).