From the course: InDesign Secrets
234 Free script identifies word stacks - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
234 Free script identifies word stacks
- [Voiceover] It's essential that you are human. Proofread your documents. Look them over. See if anything looks wrong. Now, I'm not talking about just spelling and grammar, but anything that might jump out and attract your reader, or your audience, in a bad way. For example, here's something that's tricky to catch. See how these two words, to and to, are lined up along the left margin? That's called a word stack, and they're notoriously time-consuming to find. Plus, after all, it takes a human eye to see them. Or does it? Because at the 2015 PePcon conference in Philadelphia, InDesign automation expert Chris Copeters considered this thorny problem of word stacks, and he came up with a script. And not only did he write this script, but he released it to the community for free. Here's how it works. First, you have to install it. And you can do that by going to the scripts panel, which you'll find if you go to the window menu, come down to the utilities sub menu, and then choose scripts. Inside the scripts panel, you'll see a couple folders. Application and user. Now, inside my user folder, I have another folder called David's Scripts that you won't see, but that's okay. I'm going to right click on the user folder, and then I'll choose reveal in finder. That switches to my finder. Now, if you're on windows, it'll say reveal in explorer, and it'll switch to Windows explorer. And then it automatically opens the scripts folder. And inside that folder, there's another folder called scripts panel. I'll double click on that to open it, and you can see there's my David's Scripts folder. Now I've already downloaded the script here. It's called SmokeWordStacks, because Chris always loves using puns in his product names. Anyway, I'm gonna tell you where you can find and download it yourself in a minute, but I've downloaded it, and I've unzipped it, and I'm going to install this script. So to do that, all I need to do is drag this whole folder into the scripts panel folder. There it is. Now I'm going to switch back to InDesign, and you'll see the SmokeWordStacks folder inside the scripts panel. Let's open that by clicking this little triangle. And we want to run this script by double clicking on the SmokeWordStacks.jsxbin file. That's the script inside the folder. I'll double click on it to run it, and I'm just going to use the default settings here, and click okay. Now, I should say here that the longer your document, the longer this is going to take. I would not run this on a document if it were 50 or 100 pages, it would just take forever. But for shorter documents it works great. Now, when it's done, you can see that it identified a bunch of stacks way faster than it would've taken me to find them with my own eye. And the stacks are highlighted with a thick underline style. For example, up here, the word are is highlighted with that red line, because it's the second one, the last one, in the stack. Here's another one, in the middle of a paragraph, the word pictures is duplicated. It's a stack of the same word. Let's move this scripts panel out of the way here, and you can see that there's a blue highlight here. That blue underline means it's a hyphenation stack. There are two or more hyphens in a row. Now, these red and blue lines are actually character styles that the script created and applied to the text. Now, if I wanted to, I could undo this whole thing with one click, just by pressing the old command, z or control, z on Windows. But in this case, let's say I've been working on my document, and I can't undo that step anymore. So if I wanna get rid of those highlights, all I need to do is go to my character styles panel over here, I'll open that, and I'm gonna scroll down, and I can see that the script added two character styles, text stack and hyphenation stack. I can simply drag those on top of the trash can icon, and now, I can say replace it with none. But when you do this, make sure you turn off preserve formatting. You wanna make sure that check box is off. Then I'll click okay, and you can see that that highlight goes away. Let's go ahead and get rid of the text stack, too. Set that to none, turn off preserve formatting, and click okay. Now, this is already incredible, right? But Chris went even farther, and he lets you tweak a bunch of settings inside this script. You can change that inside this .ini file, the SmokeWordStacks.ini file. Now, I wanna say you do not have to edit this file if you don't want to, but if you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty, you can do incredible things in here. Let me show you how. First, I'll switch back to the finder, or explorer, and I'm going to edit that ini file. I can do that simply by double clicking on it, and it should open up inside your default text editor. Here on the Mac, I'm using text wrangler. Now, this looks kind of scary, but it's really well commented, so you can just read through this and learn how it works pretty quickly. Now in this case, I'm just gonna scroll down here a little bit, and I'm looking for numLettersToOver/Lap. Now right now, it's set to blank, but I'm gonna set it to one. And I'll show you what that does. So I'm going to save this by pressing command s or control s on Windows, and now I'm gonna go back to InDesign, and I'm gonna run the script one more time. Once again, I'll leave it set to the defaults, and click okay. Now this takes a little bit longer, because it's looking for even one letter stacks, for example, here I have an M below another M. So it says that must be a stack. Now, that might be a little overkill, but I just wanted to show you that Chris has really given you a huge amount of power within this script, if you're willing to tweak that ini file a little bit. I should point out that Chris is the owner of rorohiko.com, and they have a lot of amazing scripts and plugins. But even better, they specialize in custom publishing automation for large companies. So if you work for a company that needs to automate some kind of publishing task, you should definitely contact them. Anyway, this script is pretty cool, huh? And, as I said, it's free. If you wanna get it, you can find it at InDesign secrets by going to this url. Cpn.co, that's .co, not com, slash g, slash stacks.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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