Welcome to Michèle’s BadTags plugin, designed to detect automation tags which contain typos. Such tags, referred to as bad tags, will not be processed by the corresponding automation tasks: CrossReferences, Indexes, ImageProcessing, and Footnotes.
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For information on other plugins please go back to my InDesign Automation page plugins section.
BadTags (1.0.0) …
Four automation tasks rely on HTML-like tags: Cross-references, Indexes, Footnotes and Image Processing. InDesign searches for tags; if they contain a type, it bypasses them. The tags InDesign searches for according to the task follow:
- Cross-references rely on <SEEx>Chapter or section header</SEE> tags. Two mishaps can invalidate the tag: the tag’s content is not a valid chapter or section header (missing or type in the name) or the tag segments contain a typo such as a missing digit or wrong digit in <SEEx> or a typo in the open or close segment. See Cross-references for details on how <SEEx> is used.
- Indexes – There are two types of indexes in the index table: page-indexes point to a page and referral-indexes point to an index entry, hence the topic/subtopic concept. Page-index tags have the format <IDX>topic[A]subtopic</IDX>. Referral-index tags are identical; replace IDX with ALSO. As the author inserts indexes into his/her manuscript, he/she can make all sorts of mistakes: bad open tags, bad close tags, parentheses instead of square brackets in the A separator, lower-case A separator instead of upper-case, missing A separator.. . You get the gist of it; the BadTags task tries to detect all of these mishaps. See Indexes for details on how <IDX> and <ALSO> are used.
- Footnotes – Two Footnote task manages footnotes via two tags: the <FTN>name</FTN> tag defines where to locate a footnote in a page. The <FNOTE>name[A]text</FTN> defines the footnote’s content. Again, the author, because of fatigue, may introduce ypos when defining footnotes. The one-to-one correspondence between <FTN> and <FNOTE> must also be checked for. See Footnotes for details on how <FTN> and <FNOTE> are used.
- Image Processing relies on two tags: image definition tags <IMG> and image cross-reference tags <FIG>. Image definition tags <IMG>imgName[A]imgCaption</IMG> define where the image should be located via their position in the manuscript, the name of the image, and a caption for the image. <FIG> tags direct the reader to the page where an image is located. As the author creates these, he/she may make all sorts of mistakes the BadTags task checks for. This task must also check that tags are well formed and that there are no incoherencies between images and tags, such as duplicate images, images which do not exist, lack of tags…
Tags, the key to automating some tasks, must be correctly formed. Any typos in a tag causes the task which relies on it to bypass it. Given that nonfiction books may have 2500+ indexes and many other tag types (my InDesign automation book for example), the author will invariably make mistakes leading to tags not getting processed. Proof-reading is one way of finding them, but this raises a problem in that proof-reading is a slow meticulous process which takes time. The more mistakes there are, the more proof-read cycles need to be undertaken. Automating bad tags detection reduces the number of proofread cycles.
Please note that the above is provided as a BadTagsReadme.txt file in the HOMEDIR/PluginData directory upon running the plugin. A dialog box displays the HOMEDIR full path.
You will find source code in my book so that you could roll your own BadTags plugin .
For information on other plugins please go back to my InDesign Automation page plugins section.
Return to the InDesign automation page.