October 10, 2024 Scribe Tools Update

By Scribe Inc.

Published

Scribe has released a major update to Scribe Tools for InDesign featuring several new tools, improvements, and fixes.

New Tools

Anchor Boxes and Move Anchor

Two new tools, Anchor Boxes and Move Anchor, have been added under Typesetting Adjustments. These are meant for projects where specific paragraph styles have to be systematically moved from the main text flow into anchored text boxes.

  1. Create an anchored text box with the required anchoring placement settings and size.
  2. Select that anchored text box.

  3. Run Anchor Boxes and select the options about what content to pull into similar boxes.

    • Select an individual style or any style that starts with certain letters. This feature makes it possible to target ah and ahaft at the same time or all sb styles.
    • Optionally pull adjacent paragraphs into a single box. This will allow for multiparagraph groupings rather than assuming each paragraph should be in its own text frame.

If the exact anchoring location needs to be adjusted, Move Anchor can then be used to move the anchor up or down by a paragraph or to place the anchor at the start or end of a paragraph.

This set of tools is intended for complex designs, where certain heads or sidebars are routinely anchored to a specific relative location. If this tool fits the needs of a particular project, feel free to contact Scribe to arrange for a demonstration of these tools.

Modify All Paragraph Styles

A tool to globally set the attributes of all paragraph styles. Optionally, changes can be made to character styles as well. There is also an option to remove all nested styles. Select the attributes to update along with the desired value.

This can radically transform a document and is intended for use during the design process when clearing certain values out of an outdated or poorly constructed source template. It will rarely be advisable to run this tool on a typeset that has already been paged and is further along in the process.

Create Combo Styles

Looks up what paragraph/character style combinations appear in the document to help create combo styles.

Any character style can be paragraph specific by adding the paragraph style name in front of it, followed by a hyphen, as long as that exact paragraph style name is in the paragraph style sheet. This combo style approach is commonly used to reverse the rendering of italics to be roman when the i style is applied within a paragraph that uses an italic base font or to apply a font to a specific paragraph style that is different from the base p style.

Select the combo character styles to be created (e.g., sb-i). In this example, sb-i will be applied automatically to the i text within sb paragraphs. This can take time to run in a document with a significant number of styles. To reduce this run time and to limit clutter in the interface, paragraph and character styles that are unlikely ever to need a combo style are not listed by this tool.

The combo styles generated by the tool are created with a custom color to help locate and define them.

List Undefined Styles

Reports styles that were imported and not defined as well as styles generated by Create Combo Styles that use the custom color created by that tool.

Remove Presentation Alt Text

If an image is deemed presentational only, it will not have alt text (short description). The decision about whether an image is strictly decorative can be subjective and based on the context of the book or an author’s/publisher’s preference.

The alt field will be empty in the final HTML. This is triggered within the Digital Hub by using “PRESENTATION” (in all caps) as the alt text. This also gets a role of “presentation” in the HTML so that read-aloud technology recognizes it is presentational.

The “PRESENTATION” alt text can travel with a document through all stages of a project, but it should be removed when producing a web PDF by using this tool.

Updated Tools

Place All Images

This tool now uses the containing paragraph style to break images into three separate types of callouts, with different default anchoring settings.

  • fig: Callouts in fig, crt, and bkpub paragraphs will have custom anchoring by default.
  • eq: Callouts in eq paragraphs will now show up in this tool and by default will anchor inline.
  • img (non-fig): All other callouts are likely to be inline images and by default will anchor inline. (Note that equation callouts outside of eq paragraphs are grouped with these images.)

Report Unmappable Styles

This tool will now report if Basic Paragraph or No Paragraph Style is applied to text in the file. All text in InDesign should use an ScML style, including text on parent pages that will not be included in HTML or ePub files (e.g., running heads).

Apply Breaking Rules

  • New Option: Select Spanish phrases. Nonbreaking spaces are added between “cap./capítulo/página” and likely numbers, between numbers and “años,” and between numbers and “a.C./d.C.” It also restores regular spaces after “de,” “la,” and “del” if nonbreaking spaces were used.
  • Updated Option: Common surname issues. Now should also fix common breaking issues with names starting with “O’…” and “Mac/Mc…”

Additional Updates

  • Anchor Items: Fixed extraction issue that caused img elements to be wrapped twice in certain instances.
  • Add tocnum Placeholder: Fixed a bug that inserted placeholders at soft returns.
  • Add Language Attributes: Fixed a bug that caused a script error in certain files.
  • The extraction process will remove dcrit style and map compound styles (e.g., dcrit-i will map to i).
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