Playing with InDesignBrot and PluginInstaller
If you want to see how those stub scripts work, here’s how you can do that.
You need to have installed PluginInstaller build #583 or higher (https://PluginInstaller.com) you can use the following link to install InDesignBrot_idjs into your Scripts Panel without unwanted clutter.
With PluginInstaller 0.2.4.583 or higher installed, click the following link:
InDesignBrot_idjs for InDesign sample script
PluginInstaller should open.
Click the Download button.
If you have multiple versions of InDesign installed, use the Install Target dropdown menu to pick the one you want to install into.
Click the Install button, and switch over to InDesign. The script should become available on your InDesign Scripts Panel.
Some rules of thumb:
– Doubling max steps will roughly double the time it takes to calculate the image.
– Doubling num pixels will roughly increase the time needed by a factor of four.
Start out with the default values and first gauge how long the script takes on your computer: your mileage may vary, and as far as I can tell my Mac with an M2 Max is pretty darn tootin’ fast.
I also found that on my Mac, InDesign now crashes when I set num pixels to 200, but 149×149 works fine (and takes about 30 mins to calculate).
Not sure about that, maybe the sheer amount of rectangles needed (40,000) is more than InDesign can handle. But I’ve calculated 200×200 renditions with earlier versions of InDesign, and those files still open just fine.
More Info About InDesignBrot
InDesignBrot source code is available on Github. I have a separate branch for a version based around Creative Developer Tools for UXP (CRDT_UXP). Note the README info further down this page.
https://github.com/zwettemaan/InDesignBrot/tree/CRDT_UXP
The main branch on Github is for an older, hybrid version where the same source code can be run in ExtendScript as well as UXPScript, for speed comparisons: