🚀 go-pugleaf

I entertained myself today writing a new tutorial. This one centers around a simple script I wrote to insert the date into a document. I discovered this morning that the inserted date always uses a two-figure number of the date, resulting in Sunday, December 07 2003 for today. So I decided to fix that.

First, I show how to fix it in JavaScript, then I show how to do it by manipulating the text after it's placed using Find/Change.

But then I decided that perhaps a user might want to have a dynamic date -- well, you can't quite do that with a script because you need to be able to have event-driven scripts to be fully dynamic. But what if you just wanted to write another script to update the dates in a document on demand -- how would that script find the dates? The answer is a character style.

But that raises issues of whether or not the user actually wants to do this. So I created a dialog to let the user choose, and I show how to tag a document so that the dialog would not be repeated if the user doesn't want to be bothered each time he runs the script. And then it occurred to me that a user might want to just make the decision once and for all for all his documents; that requires a preferences file.

So, my 2-line script became 100+ lines.

Dave