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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