InDesign Thin Font Finder

TrevorInDesign, Scripting, Scripts, TipsLeave a Comment

So how can we detect if a font is too thin? That basically was Karthi's (AKA tpk1982) question on the Adobe InDesign scripting forum. Well the answers like this: 💡 Take a sample letter which is comparatively simple to measure like an English T, Arabic Alef , Hebrew Vav or Japanese Shi etc. basically glyphs that have a long vertical to them and not too much else. A, Q, W or M wouldn't be good ideas. For our script we only dealt with English fonts (Freebie) but integrating the other language scripts should be very simple, just as one hint the font's writingScript property could be a useful property for deciding the 1st choice of which glyph to check for. Convert the T or whatever into outlines myT = myChar.createOutlines(), manually you would find the "create outlines" option in InDesigns "Type" menu. 💡 The T outline could be made of several paths take the T on the far left of the bottom row of the "Feature" picture, it has 2 separate paths, others might have quite a few more, so which path do we go for? That's right the tallest one, that's the one that's most often is going to … Read More

Logging with a smile 😃

TrevorProductivity, Scripting, TipsLeave a Comment

The ability to see snapshots of a script progress throughout it's execution is crucial for the writing and debugging of complex scripts. There are scripters who are dependent on using the ESTK for developing scripts for the most of Adobe's well know products like InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier Pro and After Effects to name but a few. What they do not appreciate is the degree of handicap they are inflicting on themselves because of their dependency. I'll probably discus this topic in the future, don't get me wrong I'm not saying that there is no place for using the ESTK just that it should be used cautiously as an exception. I want to show that the use of the ESTK for the purpose of writing to the console is a bad idea. OK for your little 20 line snippet it's not necessarily exactly the end of the world, but one has to know that writing to the ESTK console is really incredibly slow, it's comes out pretty illegible, trying to find one entry amongst a multitude of other is no pleasure to put it mildly. There's no keeping of the output from session to session and there's no built in … Read More