I got a free script off a scripter in the States, I'm in Ireland.
The script is called "preservelocalformatting".
What it does is when I import a Word file and apply the style for my body text, the Word file has no styles associated to the Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, Superscript, Subscript etc.
So if I apply the body style, the character style isn't there. I have to hit the override button. Which loses the bold, italic etc.
With this script mentioned above, it finds all the character styles and creates and applies the appropriate character style.
I can then just hit the override button for my body text and be assured that I don't have to go looking for Bold and Italic and Superscript.
Another good script that I use is for placing PDF and Indd files.
On occasion I have to place a whole PDF file into the book layout, the most PDF placing of pages I did was over 100 pages. Very tedious to click and place and click.
The script simply asked me where it wanted it and placed every page in the exact same position on each page.
For a magazine that I do I got the events manager to name the photos as the caption that he/she wanted. There is a script called Label Graphics, which applies the name of the image to a text frame just below the image in indesign.
With this, I can place all the images I want and lay it out and then hit the Label Graphics script which applies all the names of the images to the layout, which is the caption that I got the events manager to do.
Oh and the last cool script that I have is:
Say For Example This Is Your Heading And You Have 100 Of These!!!
It's very annoying to have to go and change the "For" to "for" and "This" to "this" ideally you want a heading written like:
Say for Example this is Your Heading and you have 100 of These!!!
Well I got a script that is called "Smart Cases". You can add to the list of words that you don't want to be capitalised.
Unlike Title Case that ships with InDesign, it ignores the list of words to capitalise. You can edit the script so you can insert all the conjunctions that you don't want capitalised like the following: "are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so"
Now I just select a heading, run the script and hey presto, all the conjunctions are lower case and not Title Case.
There are many other scripts, like a script to round only two corners or three, whatever corners you like. It can make nice design.
There's scripts out there to make nice random patterns, if you like that sort of thing.
There's scripts than can take a folder of images and lay them out neatly on a page for you, so You don't have to. You just select the folder and it makes the images fit to your specs.
Scripts are very very powerful and they can certainly speed up the production if you have the right script.
Scripts can be written for anything that InDesign can do.
