Practical guides, deep dives, and honest takes on InDesign scripting and workflow automation.
I've been using InDesign's native data merge since CS4. It works great until you have more than one record type, or need conditional content, or want to preview without exporting. Here's what I've switched to and why.
Read articleThere are four ways to batch-export PDFs from InDesign, and most tutorials only show you the worst one. I'll walk through all of them, when each makes sense, and the script approach that handles edge cases the built-in methods miss.
Read articleShort answer: UXP if you're starting fresh. Long answer: it's complicated and depends on what version of InDesign your clients are running. After two years of building in both environments, here's my honest assessment.
Every document that has been through a production cycle has the same problem: text that looks right on screen but is typographically wrong underneath. Straight quotes, spaced hyphens, double spaces. Here is how to find and fix all of it in seconds.
Using style overrides manually is a trap. I've audited dozens of documents where styles were technically applied but the overrides had completely defeated the point. Here's the discipline that makes automation possible.
The InDesign pasteboard is designed for temporary storage. In practice it becomes a graveyard of abandoned drafts, rejected alternates, and forgotten assets that bloat your file and generate spurious preflight errors. Here is what to do about it.