From the course: InDesign Secrets
288 Create a maze with a free script - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
288 Create a maze with a free script
- [Instructor] Okay, I have to show you this free script written by an incredible scripter, Theunis de Jong, who goes by the name Jongware. And this actually lets you create a maze in InDesign like this one, and not just rectangles, but almost any shape you want. Now if you want to make mazes in InDesign, you're going to need to get that script. You want to go to bit.ly/idmazescript. That will take you to our site, InDesign Secrets, and you can download the script from this page. Then, if you don't know how to install a script, it's really easy. Let me show you. I'll switch back to InDesign, and I'm going to go to the Window menu and choose from the Utilities sub-menu, Scripts. That opens up the Scripts panel, and now I want to right-click on the User folder. Right-click and choose Reveal in Finder. Or on Windows, it'll say Reveal in Explorer. There we go. There's my Scripts Panel folder. And here's the script that I downloaded from the website. So I'm simply going to drag that script from the Downloads folder into the Scripts Panel folder. Not the Scripts folder, but inside this other folder called Scripts Panel. Now, any script that's inside the Scripts Panel folder will show up in my Scripts panel. So I'll switch back to InDesign, open my User folder here, and you can see, there's my script. Okay, now to run the script, you have to have a shape, and it has to be on the first page of your document. I'm going to go ahead and select this and delete it, so we can start fresh. Now, I'm going to create some crazy shape using the Pen tool. I'll just click here and here, and I'll just click a few times to get a shape that I like. Now, I'll switch back to the Selection tool and I'll double-click on the script inside the Scripts panel. That's it, it's done. Now it looks a little strange because my original frame is still there. So I'm going to come over here to the Layers panel, I'll open that up, and I want to make sure my Layer 1 is open by clicking this little twirly triangle to the left. That lets me see the items inside that layer. This polygon at the bottom, the one that's selected, I can see it selected because it has a little blue square to the right, that object is the original frame that I created. So I'm simply going to press the Delete key on my keyboard to delete it. Now you can see I have two objects left. Those are objects that the script created. This next object called Polygon, is the outline of the maze. Now you'll see that that's kind of blocky, and it has to be that way because, well, the maze is all straight lines and angles. But now that outline doesn't have to be just black and white. I can come up to the Control panel and fill this with some other color, like magenta. Let me change that tint down to something smaller, like 15%. I can also make that outside border thicker if I want. Let's change this to two points. This other object called Compound Path, I'm going to go ahead and select that in the Layers panel, this is all the lines inside the maze. I'll go ahead and change this to a thinner line, let's say half a point. Okay, there's our maze. Well actually, there is one more thing we need to do. We need to add an entrance and an exit. This really baffled me for a while, because the maze doesn't add entrances and exits for me. But then I realized that, as far as I can tell, you can put these anywhere you want. And the easiest way to do that is just to make a little frame. For example, I'll come over here and grab the Frame tool and I'll zoom in on part of this maze. Now, I'm simply going to drag out an area on top of that, and I'm going to fill it with the same color as the fill color, in this case, the 15% magenta. Now all I need to do is select that and then copy it to the clipboard, move someplace else, and paste. I'll just drag it down into position here, and we have an entrance and an exit. So let's zoom back and see how it looks. There we go, there's our working maze. Now before I saw this script, if you had asked me to make a maze in InDesign, I would have just rolled my eyes and said forget it. But now, hey, thanks to Jongware, it's easy.
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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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