The story behind my latest book, Adobe InDesign Automation of Nonfiction Books via JavaScript starts with my beekeeping days. Let me explain the chain of events which finally lead me to write my third book. Weighing hives is one of the crucial daily tasks a beekeeper undertakes during the honey flow period as on good days, bees may harvest as much as 10 lbs. of nectar. Needless to say, supers, the half sized modules into which bees store honey, quickly fill up and must be harvested. Since I had dabbled in electronics, I decided to develop a gizmo which would send hive weights to my iPhone on a daily basis. The back of the envelope design was simple: strain gauges get the weights, use a Zigbee module to communicate with a central data consolidation module which sends me the data via a radio module. I sort of succeeded. It was great fun. In the process, I wrote many lines of C++ code to drive an Arduino microcontroller during which time I dedicated a great deal of time debugging. This led me to write my two books C++ Arduino Programming books. As I wrote these books, I quickly came to realize that I needed to create indexes so that the reader could find content and cross-references to direct the reader to additional content. And since I wanted the book to be professionally typeset, I chose InDesign which happened to be programmable via JavaScript; i.e., the programmer could do just programmatically just about all that which the InDesign user does manually. Eager to take on a mega-project I embarked on creating scripts which would free me from InDesign professional costs considerations. One click transformed index and corss -reference tags into corresponding InDesign objects. My InDesign programming book: Adobe InDesign Automation of Nonfiction Books via JavaScript, is scheduled to be released via Amazon on August 18th, 2026. As I wrote the book, I created scripts to handle an additional nine tasks, described in my Adobe InDesign web page.
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