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How to get alerted when opening an InDesign/InCopy document that contains notes.
At the Creative Pro Week 2018 in New Orleans, Anne-Marie Concepción posted the following suggestion for the ‘People’s Choice Script Challenge’:
I would like a script that would put up a big “There are Notes in this document” flashing graphic (I’d settle for an Alert dialog box) whenever I opened a file in InDesign (or InCopy) that had Notes in it.
Bonus, it’d have a View button that would jump to the first note, zoom in to 250% with the note icon centered on the screen, and open the Notes panel so I could read it and use the nav buttons there to jump to the next note.
Challenge accepted!
The ShowNotes.jsx script should help with that! See further below for installation info.
7-Mar-2020: v1.0.2:
Changed to MIT license
Fix bug when opening doc from previous version (e.g. open CC 2019 doc in a 2020 version app).
28-Feb-2019: v1.0.1: postpone the alert until various warning dialogs shown on document-open have been dealt with by the user
8-Jun-2018: v1.0:
First release
Rorohiko specialises in making printing, publishing and web workflows more efficient.
This script is a free sample of the custom solutions we create for our customers.
If your workflow is hampered by boring or repetitive tasks, inquire at sales@rorohiko.com
The scripts we write for our customers repay for themselves within weeks or months.
First download the Github repository as a ZIP file:
https://github.com/zwettemaan/InCopyNoteAlert/archive/master.zip
The downloaded file is in .zip compressed format. You’ll need to decompress it unless your computer already does it automatically for you.
If all is well, you should find a file called ShowNotes.jsx in the decompressed ZIP folder.
This is an ExtendScript file.
Unlike most other scripts, it is not meant to be installed into the InDesign/InCopy Scripts Panel folder.
Instead, it needs to go into the Startup Scripts folder.
A quick way to navigate to the startup scripts folder: first launch InDesign or InCopy.
Bring up the Scripts panel by means of the Window – Utilities – Scripts menu item.
Right-click the Application folder on the Scripts panel.
Select Reveal in Finder (Mac) or Reveal in Explorer (Windows) from the contextual menu.
The Scripts folder contents will appear.
In that folder, you’ll find a folder called startup scripts.
Copy or move the ShowNotes.jsx script file into this startup scripts folder.
There might or might not be a file called ForceDirectory.txt inside the startup scripts folder.
You can ignore this file. It is inert and has no function. If you like, you can safely delete ForceDirectory.txt.
Because the startup scripts folder is protected, the computer will complain a bit.
On a Mac you will probably be asked for an administrator password. On most personal computers, the administrator is you, so you can probably enter your own password.
On computers that are administered by an I.T. department, you will need to ask the I.T. department for help to get the script installed.
On my Mac it goes like this:
And on Windows it looks similar, but it probably won’t ask for a password:
VERY IMPORTANT: You must now restart InDesign or InCopy. Otherwise the script will not be activated.
As InDesign or InCopy start up, the ShowNotes.jsx script will run and install itself, waiting for you to open a document.
When you open a document, it will look for the presence of notes, and will show a dialog if it finds any.
Using the script is simple. When you open a document it will automatically check for notes.
There are a few small tweaks that can be made.
Open the script using a ‘real’ text editor program (like BBEdit, TextWrangler, NotePad, NotePad++, TextMate, Sublime…).
Avoid using a word processor program like TextEdit, MS Word… to edit the script. Word processors often destroy scripts.
There is a section near the start where you can tweak the script.
Save the tweaked script back to the startup scripts folder and restart InDesign or InCopy after making a tweak.
You can change one or more of the words true into false (all lowercase) to turn off certain features of the script.
Do not change or remove anything else.
You can also change the zoom percentage from 250 to some other percentage. Do not type a % sign with the percentage; for example, you need to enter 250, not 250%, and then end the line with a semicolon.
If the script stops working after being tweaked, simply re-download it and start over with a fresh copy.