🚀 go-pugleaf

Greeting - I've dug around in the archive and haven't found any answers to my particular troubles... and I'm beginning to think that my approach may be my problem.

Environment - Mac OS X 10.2.6, InDesign 2.0, FileMaker

I am an experienced AppleScripter and familiar with pre-press, but a novice WRT InDesign. I am creating PDFs from a database and would like to auto-flow them into a new InDesign document.

In looking at InDesign, I discovered that with the cursor in a 2-column text box, I can File>Place... a pdf into that text box. If I File>Place... again, the first PDF slides down to accomodate the second. Brilliant, thinks me - just tell the text frame to place my pdfs in reverse order and bang zoom, done and leave the office early.

No dice. When I tell the text frame to place the pdf, the text frame ceases to be a text frame anymore - it reports that it is now a rectangle. When quizzing the rectangle about any text frames it may contain, it responds blankly, with the equivalent of "WHAT text frame?" As a result, any further place commands upon this object replace the current contents, which does me no good.

here's a sample of this behavior:
tell application "InDesign 2.0"
    set myDoc to make new document
    set myPage to page 1 of myDoc
    tell myPage
        set theBox to make text frame with properties {geometric bounds:{3, 3, 63, 48}}
        display dialog "the text frame is now: " & (content type of theBox) as string
        tell theBox
                place "Full:path:to:some:simple.pdf"
        end tell
        display dialog "the text frame is now: " & (content type of theBox) as string
    end tell
end tell

If you run this script (and give it a valid path) you will note that the box starts off as a text box, and ends up as a graphic. I double-checked the results of manually File>Place..-ing items into a text box, and the silly thing stays as a text box the entire time.

So - should I ask how to make this work or if I'm even heading in the right direction? I really like the idea of simple iteration over a folder of PDFs and having everything reflow automagically, rather then having to test for reflow conditions, etc, etc.

Thanks in advance, I'll prolly clean and post the core bits of whatever I'm given, presuming I can get it working.

David