Chapter 15. Automating Your Work

Who wouldn't like to find faster ways to do the mundane, repetitious work that consumes much of our workdays? In this chapter, you'll learn how to set up the Creative Suite applications to automate many of these recurrent tasks.

Here's one example of automation: Part of your job is to regularly resize a large number of images to a predetermined size, convert them from RGB to CMYK for print, and save them to a particular format. This is a perfect candidate for automation. Or another: You regularly receive from a client PDF files that must be checked against a particular set of production standards for output. (We discuss preflighting, the process of analyzing and checking files in a print workflow, in Chapter 16.)

Automating your work saves time, and it ensures that it will be done consistently (who hasn't occasionally dozed off when doing repetitious tasks?). It also creates a way to standardize tasks for the different people in your workgroup. These are many of the same reasons we have given for using styles or presets, as we have described in other chapters of this book.

Here are some of the ways that Creative Suite applications can automate your work. These methods make use of features built into the interface of your CS2 applications. If you're technically inclined, you can create very elaborate processes using these methods. But if you're not, don't be afraid: Most of these processes can be run easily straight out of the "box," with little technical knowledge. You can:

• Record a series of commands as an action in Photoshop or Illustrator that you can play back on a file or a group of files.

• Turn an action into a mini-application called a droplet in Photoshop, or do the same with a preflight profile in Acrobat 7.0 Professional. You can drop one or more images (Photoshop) or PDF files (Acrobat) onto the droplet, and it runs the action or preflights the file.

• Run batch processes in Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat 7.0 Professional, or Bridge on multiple filesoperations that work on those files without even opening them.

• Use InDesign's Data Merge feature to merge a data-source file from a word processor or database with an InDesign document to produce mailing labels or other variable-data documents.

But sometimes your work requires that you perform tasks beyond the built-in capabilities of your CS2 applications. You can extend those applications to perform specialized work that will make you more productive, and, in many cases, automate the processes. You can:

• Create (or acquire) and run scripts. The Creative Suite applications are eminently scriptable. Even if you don't have the desire to write your own scripts, you can make use of already-written scripts or hire someone to create a time-saving script for you.

• Acquire and install plug-ins. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Bridge, and Acrobat are structured in such way that they can easily be extended by the use of plug-ins. Often created by third-party (non-Adobe) developers, these can add powerful functionality to your existing applications.

We summarize the automation capabilities of the CS2 applications at the end of the chapter, in Table 15-1.

Table 15-1. Summary of CS2 automation features

Feature	Photoshop	Illustrator	InDesign	Acrobat 7.0 Professional	Bridge
Actions	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Droplets	Yesplay actions	No	No	Yeswith Preflight tool	No
Batch Processing	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Work with Variable Data	YesVariables	YesVariables	YesData Merge	No	No
ScriptingAppleScript	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
ScriptingVisual Basic	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
ScriptingJavaScript	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Plug-ins	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No