On Feb 29, 2012, at 3:25 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
I'd like to add that the mentioned GUI programs all are scriptable - Scribus in Python (AFAIK), InDesign in JavaScript or AppleScript; don't know about the current state of XPress, in old versions on the Mac it supported Frontier, then AppleScript.
As I noted, the oars are customizable. Unfortunately, there aren't many hooks in InDesign (and none I'm aware of in Quark) to activate scripts automatically, so that a document will build itself --- one which is pretty cool is Dirk Becker's auto-indexing script which will run a script to format index entries (so as to make up for InDesign's inability to capture character styles in index entries). Even more egregious is that many features in Quark are specifically prohibited from being scripted (last I checked), requiring one to use interface events. Moreover, as was recently noted on the InDesign mailing list, long document support in InDesign is sorely lacking (the new span columns feature trumps keep specifications for minimum number lines in a paragraph for example, and it's all-too easy to have an index in a book be too large to be generated by InDesign in one pass, requiring one to do it in sections, then use a script or a specialty indexing program to merge the sub-indices. Lastly, AIUI InDesign's (and probably Quark's) licensing prohibits remote usage from a server unless one purchases the Server version. William -- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.