Streamlining Publishing Workflows with InDesign Scripts

For almost all of 2023, I had the opportunity to work for one of the major Italian publishing houses.

The context was solving an editorial emergency: the layout of some books needed to be revised to adhere to certain standards necessary for the automatic conversion of the final products into EPUB format. In particular, the most complex cases were two: one involved a series of elements whose properties needed to be modified without changing their appearance; the other required modifying certain elements, but the modifications had to stay within specific margins to avoid affecting surrounding elements. This meant handling tens of thousands of graphic elements in a short time, an impossible task to do manually while meeting deadlines.

Fortunately, the program used for laying out books, Adobe InDesign, offers some APIs for scripting certain operations.

The Publishing Challenges We Faced

My team was managing numerous book projects, roughly 7 complete books with at least 12 chapters each. This created several practical challenges:

• Verifying changes without affecting other elements
• Tracking fonts and styles across multiple documents
• Maintaining consistency in style definitions
• Reducing time spent on manual synchronization
• Different synchronization patterns inside and across books

While InDesign offers built-in features for some of these tasks, they weren't granular enough for our complex production needs, which led me to explore custom scripting solutions.

Key Requirements for Effective Scripts

After consulting with all teams involved in the production workflow, I established several important requirements for any scripting solution:

• Minimal workflow disruption: Scripts needed to operate independently without complex implementation steps
• Standard installation compatibility: All solutions had to work with our existing InDesign installations without additional IT approvals
• User-friendly interfaces: Regardless of technical proficiency, anyone on the team needed to be able to use these tools

I also prioritized designing scripts that accounted for real-world usage conditions. In publishing, we often use these tools during busy periods, when tired, approaching deadlines, or handling multiple projects simultaneously. The scripts needed built-in safeguards like confirmation dialogs for irreversible actions, automatic backups before batch operations, and clear visual feedback to prevent errors when team members were multitasking or under pressure.

Also, scripts that modify elements in a document are much harder to write than scripts that only inspect the document, so extra care is needed in those cases.

Practical Solutions for Common Problems

Document Comparison and Verification

One consistent concern was ensuring that only intended changes were made to documents. To address this, I developed an application that compared PDFs before and after modifications, highlighting only the differences.

This tool became particularly valuable also during final revision stages when working with editors. The back-and-forth revision process often introduces the risk of regression, where previously approved elements inadvertently change. With our comparison tool, we could confidently make late-stage edits while ensuring that only the requested changes were implemented, without disrupting previously finalized content.

Style Management Across Documents

InDesign features for advanced style management or synchronization are lacking, so to address our style management challenges, I created several specialized scripts:

• A font inventory script that documented all fonts used across every document in a book and generated detailed reports
• A script to identify styles used across multiple documents, providing visibility into our style ecosystem
• A tool that located styles with identical names but different definitions across documents—a common source of formatting inconsistencies
• A utility that found instances where the same style definition existed under different names, helping us consolidate duplicate styles
• A script to identify unused styles across documents, allowing us to reduce panel clutter
• A dependency tracker that identified styles dependent on styles from different folders
• A usage frequency counter that showed how often each style appeared in documents

These are some examples, but there are tens more. I have not redacted almost any script from proprietary information so I cannot share them without thoroughly going through them, but if you need some of them, as always, send me an email and I'm going to provide you with a redacted version of the scripts that you need.

Enhanced Style Synchronization

To improve upon InDesign's limited synchronization capabilities, I developed scripts that offered:

• Selective synchronization of specific styles across a book, giving us precise control over which elements would update
• Efficient batch renaming of styles across all documents, helping maintain naming conventions

The Impact in Numbers

Just to give an idea on how just a portion of these scripts made a measurable difference:

These scripts reduced our weekly manual labour time from approximately 15-20 hours to just minutes. For this project alone, we saved roughly 400 hours of production time, that we used to solve problems that needed a discretionary decision from a team member each time.

The key insight wasn't necessarily technical sophistication, but rather understanding our specific workflow challenges and creating targeted solutions that integrated naturally into our existing processes.

In the end we achieved an approximately 40% reduction in production time while improving quality control, and that is the important thing: I feel that in a competitive market, the best solutions have to create a positive upside in quality control alongside the performance gain. In this particular context, full of amazing professionals with decades of experience, due to the need of dealing with increasingly complex production environments, custom scripting has become an essential skill for maintaining efficiency and quality. The good news is that it is not hard to create scripting solutions that do not substitute the professional experience, but rather it enables the professional to focus on delivering a quality work, maybe even more than a couple of years ago where the pressure of producing more was already there but the tools were not so accessible.

Going forward: Reflections on JSX and the Transition to JavaScript and UXP

Current JSX Limitations

Working extensively with ExtendScript (JSX) for InDesign automation has revealed several limitations:

• Based on ECMAScript 3, it lacks many modern JavaScript features
• Limited debugging tools
• Single-threaded execution that can cause performance issues
• Inconsistent document object model access
• Basic error messages that can be difficult to interpret

However, working with JSX's limited standard library does offer an interesting advantage. Since common methods, like Array.reduce() for example, aren't included, developers need to implement many utilities from scratch. While this requires more initial work, it results in complete transparency: I knew exactly what each line of code did. The only real variable becomes the InDesign scripting API itself. For mission-critical publishing workflows, this level of control and predictability has proven beneficial.

Benefits of JavaScript and UXP

On the other hand, Adobe's transition to modern JavaScript and the Unified Extensibility Platform (UXP) could bring several improvements:

• Access to more modern JavaScript features
• Enhanced development tools including better debugging capabilities
• Native UI components using HTML/CSS, which is fairly good, mainly because it is less cumbersome to set up if you have more experience in HTML than in the Adobe API for menus
• Improved performance through multi-threaded operations
• Direct integration with web services, although it has to be seen if it is flexible enough
• More robust plugin architecture with persistent states that SHOULD be easier to manage and maintain in the long term

Additional Opportunities

Beyond the core improvements, this transition opens up interesting possibilities:

• Cross-application workflows between different Adobe products. I'm thinking about some possibilities with Illustrator or PDF reader for better illustration standardization of procedures and automatic checks
• Better workflow analysis through usage metrics, especially in the context of a big company, collecting bugs and usage metrics automatically can speed up significantly both the development cycle and also the decisions about what features are encountering the most success in the organization and where we want to invest our limited resources

Thank you

If for some reason this is your first introduction to InDesign scripting, first, I'm sorry :), second, here are two good resources that you might not find easily on the web:

• NT Production, a YouTube channel that explains the practical side of writing scripts, useful for beginners.
• http://kasyan.ho.ua a website full of interesting resources, recommended to everybody.

As always, thank you for your time. I also always get a lot of emails, considering how poorly these articles are put together, so thank you for taking the time to write.

If you want to send me something, XY at gmail.com where X = tommaso and Y = bassignana, no dots between X and Y. Don't worry about making it short: Seneca said something like "If I had time, I would've made it shorter.", but there are things more important than correcting email drafts ;) and I like sharing about what you have to say!