This is a simple trick to get a square bracket in front of a paragraph. The bracket gets taller or shorter automatically. In my case, it’s used for an agenda.

Every month, a small team and I design a cooking magazine. Laying out all the recipes is a labor-intensive job. That's why I started searching for a way to automate and simplify the process.

After trying a while with GREP expressions and Paragraph Styles, it became clear that wouldn’t be enough. This gave me the opportunity to set my first small steps into InDesign Scripts and write my first small script. I couldn’t find much information for beginners on the internet and had never written in Javascript before. Therefore, it took me quite a while to come up with these…

Recently I had to make a movie magazine in just a few days. To speed up work I used GREP to automate the star ratings at the end of each movie title. For example: (4 stars) had to become ★★★★☆.

The word stars consists of 5 letters. These letters can be used to make the 5 stars. To distinguish between a full and an empty star, the letters are placed in upper- or lowercase based on the rating. For example: (4 stars) becomes (4 STARs).

To achieve this make 2 Character Styles called ‘Star’ and ‘Empty Star’. Open ‘Star’, go…