🚀 go-pugleaf

Richard,

1. This is not an issue for me. I develop scripts for myself to do my work more efficiently; in a way my clients, when they pay for an editing or setting job, also pay for the scripts I write. So when a script is stable, I don't mind sharing it with others.

2. I thought there weren't any cross-application capabilities. But whether or not this is the case, it doesn't bother me very much because my use of Indesign is autistic in that I hardly interact with other applications from within ID--maybe the clipboard, and Illustrator sometimes, but that's about it.

3. This may be a point, but so far it hasn't troubled me a lot. It turns out that through JS you can interrogate ID and (in my case Windows) quite fruitfully. For example, it's pretty easy to find values for character width, kerning, and the like. And in JS you have pretty good file handling capabilities. Maybe for a really serious user OS interaction is meagre, but as I said, I've not come across serious limitations (yet?).

4. I never knew Basic very well and I've always struggled with its lack of structure--well, what I perceived as lack of structure. I lose my way in Basic code, while Pascal for me is easy to follow. I am pretty familiar with Pascal and Prolog, and especially knowledge of Pascal (Turbo Pascal) made learning Javascript relatively easy. JS is much like C, and that the switch from Pascal to C can be made easily is borne out by a book I have (from the 1980s), a comprehensive guide for switching from Pascal to C, which is about 100 pages long (or short). But anyway, I'm sure that for anybody familiar with a programming language it's not that hard to learn a new language as long as it is typologically similar. I started with JS in November. My main struggle was with ID's object model and I've spent some hours in frustration. But practise, obstinacy, this forum, and a very patient friend sorted that out, and I feel that by now I'm pretty comfortable with ID's model. The language is not that hard to learn for much of the scripting requirements. And problems with ID's object model are the same in any language.

5. Ah, well, yes, indeed. Initially I thought JS's debugger was totally useless, but I've learnt to, well, love it I wouldn't say, but vaguely come to terms with, yes. But you're right: compared with Delphi and VB, JS's debugger is pretty basic. My main two problems are that (a) the screen doesn't update (as Dave already mentioned), and (b) the debugger can watch just one variable at a time.

Peter