Create charts and graphs directly inside Adobe InDesign — no Illustrator round-trip needed.
ChartMaker is a single ExtendScript (.jsx) file that generates fully native InDesign vector charts from tabular data. Every element it creates — bars, curves, areas, labels, axes — is a standard InDesign object you can ungroup and restyle with your document's swatches, paragraph styles, and fonts.
If you produce data-driven reports in InDesign, you've probably been through this loop:
- Build a chart in Excel or Google Sheets
- Recreate it in Illustrator so it looks right
- Place it in InDesign
- Manually adjust colors, fonts, and spacing to match the layout
ChartMaker skips steps 1–3. Paste your numbers, pick a chart type, and get native objects on your page.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Bar Chart | Grouped vertical bars, multiple series side by side |
| Stacked Bar Chart | Series stacked within each category |
| Pie Chart | Wedges with percentage labels |
| Scatter Plot | X/Y point cloud from two data series |
| Line Chart | Smooth Bézier curves through data points |
| Area Chart | Stacked filled areas with smooth edges |
| Range Bar | Floating min–max bars (e.g. daily high/low) |
- Download
InDesign_ChartMaker_v2.jsx - Place it in your InDesign Scripts folder:
- Window → Utilities → Scripts
- Right-click the User folder → Reveal in Finder / Explorer
- Drop the
.jsxfile in there
- It will appear in your Scripts panel — double-click to run
No plugin installation, no extensions, no admin privileges required.
- Open any InDesign document
- Double-click the script in the Scripts panel
- Paste tab-separated data into the text field (copy straight from Excel or Google Sheets)
- Choose your chart type, size, palette, and options
- Click Create Chart
The chart appears centered on the active page as a grouped set of native objects.
Standard rows-and-columns, tab-separated. First row = series names, first column = row labels:
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
Revenue 120 150 180 210
Costs 80 95 110 130
Profit 40 55 70 80
For Range Bar, provide exactly two series (Low and High):
Low High
1 FEB 150 240
7 FEB 80 200
14 FEB 130 310
21 FEB 160 230
- Width / Height — Chart dimensions in millimeters
- Line weight — Stroke weight for line and area chart curves (in points)
- Color palette — 6 built-in CMYK palettes:
- Corporate Blue
- Warm Tones
- Cool Greens
- Monochrome
- Vibrant Mix
- Editorial Pastels
- Show values — Display data values on the chart
- Legend — Auto-generated legend
- Grid — Background gridlines
- Data points — Show dots at each data point (for line charts)
Everything is a native InDesign object. You can:
- Ungroup and select individual bars, lines, labels, or areas
- Restyle with your document's color swatches and paragraph styles
- Resize or reposition any element
- Change fonts on all labels at once via Find/Change
- Apply effects like drop shadows, transparency, or corner options
- Copy elements between documents
- Adobe InDesign CC 2020 and newer (tested through 2026)
- Works on macOS and Windows
- ExtendScript-based — no UXP dependency, no internet connection needed
- Charts are static — editing data requires re-running the script
- No automatic chart title (add your own text frame)
- Smooth curves use Catmull-Rom interpolation, which may overshoot on highly irregular data
- Pie chart labels may overlap with many small slices
MIT — use it however you want.
Issues and pull requests welcome. If you'd like to add a chart type (donut, horizontal bar, waterfall, etc.), the codebase is structured around a simple drawing-primitives layer that makes it straightforward to add new types.