My Calendar Caffuffle

UPDATE 2018-02-24: The script is now working and available from the downloads page. Click here to read more about the script in action.

Around this time of year, I usually get into the festive season by offering a new script for readers of the website. This year, I intended to release a free script that would generate a year planner based on the calendar year, page size and school term dates. After a weekend or so, I’d managed to create a proof of principle script using a Native InDesign Dialog and used it in a live project. Here are some shots of the first iteration of the script, along with the output:

While the script worked, it was not perfect, given that there was no error correction for the date fields, so if values were entered into date fields that weren’t the correct date syntax, the script would return an error. It was at this moment in time that I’d realised something very important:

There’s a difference between Native InDesign Dialogs and ScriptUI

Gabe Harbs has a brilliant write-up about the differences on the InDesign Scripting forums but ultimately it meant that the script would not allow for error correction unless it was rewritten using ScriptUI, something I was hoping to avoid. I’ve begun the re-write of the script but have not proceeded to far as I’m encountering a few issues. Here’s what I have now:

For now, that’s as far as the script has progressed, and this leads onto the second issue:

A busy work schedule that included Adobe MAX

Between October to December is usually very busy as there is seasonal work such as school diaries, yearbooks and other collateral that is wanted by the end of the Australian school year. In addition to this influx of work, I also had the opportunity to attend Adobe MAX 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

During MAX, I’d informed several of my peers about the upcoming script that I’d planned on releasing, only to realise the following:

Schools years, terms and holidays differ between countries

In Australia, the school year starts towards the end of January and ends in the second or third week of December. There are four terms and each state has their own term dates. Within this structure, private schools can also set their own dates, and this usually varies by a week or so of the Government schools. Given that I live in Australia, I’d created the script for use within the rules that apply for Australia.

However, I’d neglected the fact that users in the northern hemisphere have a completely different school year that starts in one calendar year and finishes in the next calendar year. This rendered my script of little to no use to most InDesign users, so for now the script sits on the shelf waiting for a quieter time before I revisit the idea.

I won’t leave you empty-handed!

Despite these setbacks, I still have a festive season gift to bestow: A day to a page planner script. Upon running this script, the user is asked for a start and end date range in ISO date format. When an appropriate date range is chosen and the OK button is clicked, a new InDesign document is made, creating threaded frames that contain a day to a page that contains the correct date.

The script can be downloaded from the downloads page of Colecandoo.

If you are interested in the year planner project discussed in this article, feel free to contact me via my contact page.

Check out the Youtube videos too!

Since 2015, I’ve also been preparing a series of short videos on Youtube that complement the articles already on the Colecandoo website. I plan to release more videos and if you haven’t seen the channel, check it out here.