recently I saw a tool somewhere, own made by that guy, that could print 4-up or 8-up on 1 page. This is what I mean: when you have a lot of PDF’s, EPSes, JPG’s, Tif’s,… which you have to print out you can do that on 1 page. 1 file per page. But this costs a lot of paper as the files mostly are small, like a businesscard but a little bigger. That guy, who did not want to give me or sell me that tool, had made a script which allows you to assemble 4 or 8 files, images, on 1 page in InDesign. When you have more images, InDesign creates extra pages automatically.
Underneath every placed image, there’s the name of that image (great!).
I adore that script but unfortunately the guy doesn’t want to sell me and I cannot script it myself. Maybe there are some genius scripters here which can help me or who knows software (free or to be bought) what can help me out.
Anyone any idea?
thnx,
Kris
Model: Powerbook 17"
Browser: safari
Operating System: Mac OS X (10.4)
Without any scripting you can go print, choose layout, and tile pages 2up to 16up, add a border around each page if you like, and print, simple!
Or you script would go like this
Drop files on droplet
Choose how many up (2, 4, 8, 16)
Work out if images or PDF
New Document (Are you US letter or A4) with pages (items divided by n-up) using a nice designed template would help
repeat
Draw a box (with or with border)
place the image
scale to fit box
add filename, size, or what every else information you what about the file
Save
Print
Close
The only thing is multi-page PDF (I don’t know how you get the total pages and choose which page to place, but a bit of looking it shouldn’t be to hard.
Total 30 mins for images only, another likely an hour for PDFs
Have a go writing the script yourself. Not to hard.
Or offer on macfreelancer. I would bid at 1 and 1/2 hours work.
KGE, If you are a user of Adobe’s CS2 suite of apps then give this ago. Fire up the Bridge application point it to a folder containing your files to import. Make selection to cherry pick what files you want or leave to use the lot. Then go to menu/bar/tools/Create InDesign contact sheet. From here you can set up you page size and how many items you want on each rows/columns choose your captions options then import. You can even choose to fly straight through to PDF if you so wish. This script is supplied with the suite and is in JavaScript as Adobe has made Bridge JS only. If you require making changes to this you may get lucky here otherwise go to Adobe’s Bridge scripting forum. Hope this helps.
Having written an image cataloging(contact sheet) script, and evolving it from Quark 4.1 through ID CS2, there is a bit more than an hour or two’s worth of work to get everything written and debugged, and adding in a bit of error catching. The method and availability of solutions depends a on your OS and version or versions of ID that you have to use as well as what you are wanting to build a contact sheet of as well as the file formats that you want placed into that contact sheet. My current solution works with CS and CS2 and places most formats commonly used in print design, including most PDF’s. It will work with 10.3, there is a better method to get PDF page counts that works on 10.4 than the one I created that will run on older OS’s. I’m currently working on revising it and adding some features such as placement at 100% and sorting by size to use the available space best as well as adding an AppleScript Studio interface for greater user customization/flexability including saved presets. As someone new to AppleScript you could probably put together something that would work with the help of the forums, but I would look for another solution that fits your needs unless you just want to take the time to learn how to do it.
Old story 20% work to get 80% there. For perfection 80% to get that 20% more. 2 hours for that 20% and 10 hours to perfection. I was trying not to scare him off.
Interested in how you get the number of pages of a PDF in OSX 10.4. Post it please
I am building an application that does this in ID CS2 right now, as well as a more traditional image catalog (contact sheet), as well as a sheet of Randoms (Art Gangs) placed at 100% (or as close to that as the page size will allow), and plan to have an alpha version ready soon with a minimal user interface. Last night I think I worked out one of the last actual problems with placing the images at 100%, or rather scaling those that are too large to fit on the selected page size so that they do fit. I will post more information tonight or tomorrow.
For those that are interested in something like this I have posted an alpha version of one that I am working on to script builders or you can get it from my site. It is a bit minimalist right now, as is the web site.
