Welcome to Michèle’s DocStats plugin, designed to provide information on a document’s contents.
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DocStats (1.0.0) skims through an InDesign document to provide metrics such as number of characters, paragraphs, tags, etc. You will find the complete list below. Please note that DocStats should be run before and after processing the document, and just before sending in to the printers to ensure that there are no stray automation-related tags left behind.
- Home directory (HOMEDIR) – Plugin’s home directory. In Windows, it is located deep down in C:/Users/<user>… You will find its full path in the dialog displayed when you run the plugin.
- Logfiles directory – Plugin’s data directory. Namely plugin’s HOMEDIR/PluginData.
- Stories – Stories in document. Main story contains manuscript. Stories is where InDesign places text in; it does not place text directly in pages such as Microsoft Word and other authoring tools do.
- Pages – Document’s page count in document.
- Characters – Overall number of characters in the document.
- Words – Number of words in the document. Words are a character sequence delimited by spaces, tabs, or newlines.
- Paragraphs – paragraphs are character sequences which end with a hard new line (ASCII 13 as opposed to a soft newline ASCII 11).
- Swatches – Colors in the document, they are referred to as swatches.
- Headers – Chapter and section headers. Their format style name start with ‘HDG’. Four levels are supported, from ‘HDG0’ to ‘HDG3’.
- Chapters – Number of chapters in the document. The document’s top level section.
- Spreads – When you look at an opened book, you are looking at a spread, i.e., a left page and a right page.
- Images – The number of embedded images in the book. These are brought in as embedded images in the imported manuscript. This count includes both processed and unprocessed via automation images
- Processed images count – Processed images means that images have been properly positioned and captions have been added to them.
- Cross-references redirect the reader to a page for information on a subject or to view an image.
- Topics – InDesign index entries are topic/subtopic pairs.
- Footnote tags enable creating and managing footnotes.
- Cross-reference tags – Automation use <SEEx>…</SEE> tags create cross references where x in the tag is the InDesign cross-reference format index to use.
- Page-index tags – They are based on <IDX>…[A]…</IDX> tags. Automation gets and parses these to create InDesign page-index entries.
- Referral-index tags -Similar to page-index tags – <ALSO>…[A]…</ALSO> tags. They do not point to a page, they point to another topic.
- Unprocessed images count – These are images in their raw state. They have not been processed. Their number should be zero after processing them.
- Image tags define the names, captions and locations of images – After processing their count should be zero. Their format is <IMG>…[A]…</IMG>.
- Image group tags – Automation transforms <IMG> tags into <GRP> tags to enable the InDesign user to fine tune image positioning. After doing so he/she deletes them progressively. DocStats should be run just before submitting the document to the printer to ensure that all <GRP> tags have been removed.
- Image cross-reference tags point to the page an image is located in. Their format is <FIG>…</FIG>.
Please note that the above is provided as a docStatsReadme.txt file in the HOMEDIR/PluginData upon running the plugin.
You will find source code in my book Adobe InDesign Automation of Nonfiction Books via JavaScript so that you could roll your own DocStats plugin .
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