I am looking to convert (redo) my Quark 4/OS 9 scripts to InDesign CS2/OS X. The scripts take Quark templates and place text and images into the boxes. I’ve used ALAP’s Xpert Scripter to name the boxes in Quark for the scripts to work. Unfortunately, I can’t find an InDesign tool that allows me to name boxes so my scripts know which boxes get what. Another thing that doesn’t help is that I don’t know InDesign, yet. So can anybody help me? Does InDesign have a method to name boxes for Applescript built in? Or should I be taking another approach to this? I thought of actually building every box as needed but really don’t want to recreate a template everytime.
The scripts are used to build real estate house listing pages, with a picture of the house, ad text, a pic of the realtor, the realtors name, and place a banner if needed. So here’s a more detailed process of what this script does.
A dialog box asks ad designer what date should be used. Then the script opens a FileMaker Pro database, searches for all listings running that date and counts them. Then a Quark document is chosen depending on how many listings are running and opened. All the appropiate text and images are then placed by the script.
So the Quark template has boxes named housePic, houseDesc, realtorMug, realtorName. They are used in an array so if there are 8 listings, it is actually housePic(1), housePic(2), etc.
So how can I script that with InDesign?