Scripting InDesign CS3/4 with JavaScript

InDesign’s Object Model

The object model is best explored in the ESTK, so fire it up and press Ctrl/Cmd+N to start a new script file. Make sure that the console is displayed. In InDesign, start a new document, create a text frame, and fill it with placeholder text. Place the cursor somewhere in the text.

In the ESTK, place the cursor in the blank script window, type app.selection[0] and run this one line (press F5 or choose Run from the Debug menu). ([0] is an index; its meaning is not very important just now.) This one-line script tells you what is selected in the InDesign document. In the JavaScript console, ESTK reports [object InsertionPoint].

This tells us that what we have currently selected is an object of type “insertion point.” (This is sometimes also referred to as “the cursor position.”) Let’s experiment a bit further. Go to the InDesign document and select just one character. Return to the ESTK and choose Run again. ESTK now reports [object Character]. Let’s try some more: in the InDesign document, select a word by double-clicking it; ESTK tells you that your selection is a word object: [object Word]. Go on to triple-click somewhere in the InDesign document to select a line, and run the script against that selection: [object Line]. Quadruple-click somewhere in a paragraph, and ESTK says [object Paragraph]. Finally, select the whole text frame in InDesign (Ctrl/Cmd+click) and choose Run in the ESTK; it reports [object TextFrame]. So you see, whatever you have selected, ...