From the course: InDesign Secrets

370 Run scripts with Quick Apply or shortcuts - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

370 Run scripts with Quick Apply or shortcuts

- [Instructor] I use a lot of InDesign scripts. You can see my Scripts panel over here. And the problem, of course, is that I can rarely find the script that I want quickly. There are just too many of them in here. And since the whole point of using scripts is to speed up my work, it's kind of self-defeating. But there are two great solutions, use Quick Apply or use a keyboard shortcut. Here, let me show you. I'm going to close the Scripts panel, so I can see what I'm doing better. And I have this object selected on my page. You've heard us talk about Quick Apply before because it is so helpful. You just press Command + Return on the Mac or Control + Enter on Windows, and up comes this panel. And let's say I want to run the MakeGrid script that comes with InDesign. So I'll just type grid. Now a lot of different menu items show up here, but I don't see the script that I'm looking for. And that's because, by default, InDesign won't show you scripts, but that's easy to change. All you need to do is click this little triangle popup menu, and this shows you all the things that Quick Apply will or won't do. And the one thing that's turned off is Scripts. I don't know why. But now I'll just click that, and now Scripts is on. And there we go, it updates the list, and it's showing me the scripts. Now I could just click on that script, or, in this case, I'll press the down arrow on my keyboard a couple of times until it chooses MakeGrid.jsx. Then I'll hit Return or Enter, and it runs the script. There we go. Now I'll just click OK, and you can see it makes a grid out of that object. Now I'll run a different script. I'm going to select these four objects. And once again, I'll press Command + Return or Control + Enter to open Quick Apply. This time, I'm going to type s:. That means only show me scripts. It just filters it down, which is helpful. And then I'll type crop, and there's a list of all the scripts that use that word. So I'll press the down arrow key once, hit Return or Enter, and it runs the script. That is much faster than searching through the panel. Okay, but for some scripts that I use all the time, even Quick Apply is too slow. I just want a single keyboard shortcut to run it. Like maybe I need to sort paragraphs a lot. You might know that InDesign comes with a SortParagraphs script. So to do that, I'm going to go to the Edit menu and choose Keyboard Shortcuts way down here. Now if you haven't yet made your own set, then you want to come over here and click New Set and give it a name. Then in the Product Area popup menu, choose Scripts. And I need to find the script that I want. In this case, I happen to know that it's inside Application, Samples, JavaScript, and then there it is, SortParagraphs. So I'll choose that. And then down here, I'm going to give it a shortcut. I'll press Control + Shift + S. You just need to find something that isn't used elsewhere. And on the Mac, the Control key isn't used much, so that usually works pretty well. I'm also going to change the Context popup menu to Text because I only want this keyboard shortcut to work when I'm editing text. Great, now I'll click Assign and click OK. Let's try it. I'll double-click inside this text frame to switch to the Type tool, and I'll select all this text. And then I'll press the keyboard shortcut that I just made, and up comes this little dialog box. So it's working, that's the script. So I'll just press Return or Enter, and boom, we're done. If you're not using scripts, you're probably not really being efficient with InDesign. And if you're taking too much time looking through that Scripts panel to find the script that you want, then these tricks will definitely help speed you up.

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