3/19/2024 0 Comments Newspaper templates for indesign![]() (If you use this, I recommend including some light caching so that you don’t over-query the Airtable API, or wherever your stories are stored.) The README at the root of the repository explains further how the API query and response should work and includes some basic installation instructions. "subhead": "You should really read this", In our case, it’s implemented as a single action controller in Laravel, which essentially proxies the query on to the Airtable API and maps out a new, simpler data structure from the result with some content cleanup thrown in along the way: I referred to a “remote API” above because even though our stories are managed in Airtable right now, I chose to introduce an intermediate API for the InDesign script to call for simplicity and so that we weren’t locked in to Airtable’s way of doing things. It saves more time on some stories than others, but especially for the ones that involved a lot of applying inline character styles that were being lost or mangled during copy/paste, I think it’s a clear win. This turns what could be a tens or hundreds of clicks process for a given story into just a few clicks. We’re also working toward adding support for images and captions/cutlines. ![]() Layout editor drags the new layer(s) into place, adjusts dimensions, and marks the stories as placed.Script finds and replaces Markdown syntax in the content with established InDesign styles for bold, italics, body subheaders, bullet points, etc.Using a base story layer that exists in our page template, script creates a new story layer with the headline, subhead, byline, story content, etc.Script makes a call to a remote API with the page number as a query parameter, to see what stories are available and ready to be placed on that page, and gets them as a JSON data structure.Script determines what page is being worked on based on the filename. ![]() Layout editor opens a page file they want to do layout on.I thought I’d go into a little more detail here about how it works: That script is now in production and while it still has some rough edges, is also open sourced on GitHub. One of them that was in progress at the time was a script to fetch articles and story content from our Airtable-managed story database for faster placement on the page, instead of copying and pasting.
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