I do support for a research company that collects large amounts of data, analyzes it, and publishes it each year. In the course of a year, we'll produce thousands of standardized data-driven profiles of companies and countries. So why do I care about InDesign? Well, we like our profiles to look pretty.
Turns out though, that out of the box, InDesign isn't the best for repetitive tasks. Of course, InDesign and indeed all Desktop Publishing applications have template and styling systems, and for the vast majority of problems these are sufficient. However, knowing how to effectively use an application's scripting framework adds extensively to the overall value and opens vast new realms of possibilities. More importantly, this knowledge can allow designers to be just as lazy as programmers [1]... perhaps, dare I dream, even to become programmers themselves.
Aimed primarily at experienced InDesign users, while this may not be a very large demographic, Peter Kahrel's "Scripting InDesign with Javascript" is useful for anyone who needs to automate InDesign to create professional looking documents. This PDF serves an important purpose (as opposed to the majority of the API reference documents) "Scripting InDesign..." is perhaps the most accessible entrance to InDesign's API.
Since InDesign users aren't usually programmers, Kahrel begins with a brief Javascript tutorial. Now to some web programmers, Javascript may be the tool of the devil. I mean, we've all dealt with cross browser support and hacks. The web is saturated with examples of the worst kinds of Javascript abuse. Weird thing though -- turns out when it doesn't have to run a committee designed API on different interpreters, Javascript ain't too shabby.
Now, the bad. My main complaint was that one fairly essential feature (the ExtendScript Toolkit, basically Adobe's embedded IDE with a handy object catalog and console) required InDesign CS2, which was unavailable to me. Yes, I'm using obsolete software, but CS3 is going to be so much cooler, right? In any event, some kind of warning/system requirement might have been nice.
Now, to wrap things up: InDesign makes pretty documents. But we're all busy -- who wants to mouse all day? You've got things to do. Wouldn't you rather script you're work away instead? With the magic of computers, this is possible! But do you want to read through thick reference docs? Of course not! So get this PDF and learn how to get rolling. Then read the reference docs.
[1] http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/talk.html#s-53
