290 Work with scripts

- [Instructor] InDesign has a lot of features but there is so much that I want to do that InDesign just can't. But the good news is that this program is extremely extensible, and that means that people who know how to code can write plug-ins and scripts and add-ons that extend InDesign's abilities, and let it do all kinds of things that it couldn't otherwise do. Now I'm not an InDesign scripter, but often I'll find a script that somebody else has written for InDesign in a forum or a blog post, or on some website, and I'll download it and I'll install it into InDesign.

Let me show you how you can do that. First I'll go to the window menu. Come down to the utilities sub-menu, and then choose scripts. That opens up the scripts panel, and now I need to open up the scripts panel folder on my hard drive, and to do that I need to right-click on either application or user. Technically you can put your scripts into either the application folder or the user folder but in most cases I find it's cleaner to just use my user folder. So I'm going to to right-click on the user folder and choose reveal in Finder.

On Windows of course it would say reveal in Explorer. So here you can see the scripts panel folder. Any script that you put inside the scripts panel folder will show up inside your scripts panel. So I'm going to double-click on that and you can see that I have a whole bunch of scripts in here already. Now I've downloaded this script from the InDesign Secrets website, and I'm going to grab it and drag it into my scripts panel folder. That's all I need to do. I don't need to restart InDesign or anything like that.

I simply switch back to InDesign, and I'll open my user folder and you can see there it is. There's the script I just added. Now like I said, I have a lot of scripts. Hey, you can't have too many scripts right. But after a dozen or so it becomes really hard to find the script that you want. So that's when you need to organize them, and the best way to organize them is to put them inside of other folders. You can see that I've already put some of the scripts inside of folders like this.

So let me show you how to do that. I'll switch back to the Finder, or Windows Explorer, and you can see that I have folders inside this folder, with scripts inside of them. So in order to organize your scripts panel you want to add your own folders inside this folder. Let's try it out. I'm going to create a new folder window and I can do that on the Mac by coming up here to the file menu and choosing new folder. And then I'm going to name it, I'm going to call it export scripts. There we go.

Now all I need to do is drag some of my scripts inside of that folder. Here's a few more export scripts, I'll drag those into the folder. And there we go, I have five export scripts inside that export scripts folder. So when I go back to InDesign and look inside my scripts panel, I can see immediately I have an export scripts folder in here as well. And there are the scripts that I put into it. So this makes it so much easier to find the scripts that I need.

I could even make folders inside of folders. Whatever folder structure I create inside that scripts panel folder, is reflected here inside the scripts panel itself. Like with so many other things, it's worth taking a few minutes to set up your scripts and folders. Take a little time now in order to save yourself a lot of time in the future.