What s New in Adobe InDesign CS4 Products SDK For the benefit of previous users, this document summarizes the changes to the SDK in this release. C++ IDE Requirements On Windows, the required C++ development environment is now Visual Studio 2005, Service Pack 1. On Mac OS, the required C++ development environment is XCode 2.4.1 for MacOS 10.4.x or XCode 3.1 for MacOS 10.5.x. Porting Content IDML Porting content was developed to help you transition to InDesign CS4. Adobe InDesign CS4 Porting Guide discusses the main changes to the InDesign API, and porting procedures. The changes to the InDesign CS4 API discussed in that document include links-architecture restructuring, scripting undo, gsession removal, user-interface changes, and other minor changes. IDML is an XML-based format for representing InDesign content. Essentially, it is a major revision of INX, InDesign's previous XML-based file format. IDML addresses INX shortcomings, in an effort to represent InDesign content in a human-readable format something that can be reasonably assembled and disassembled by a competent XML programmer. The INXErrorLogging sample project provides a reference implementation of the IINXErrorHandler error-logging interface. This implementation writes all error and warning messages during INX and IDML import and export to a log file. IDMLTools is a Java package that provides APIs, tools, and sample code that demonstrates how to work with IDML. The package is in the following directory and described more thoroughly in the ReadMe file in this directory: SDK/devtools/sdktools/idmltools The SDK also includes two new IDML documents: IDML File Format Specification formally describes the IDML file format. Adobe InDesign Markup Language (IDML) Cookbook provides practical, but less formal, information about working with IDML. 1
What s New in Adobe InDesign CS4 Products SDK Links 2 Links A new links sample, ExtendedLinks, was written to demonstrate the improved capabilities of the restructured links architecture. This sample pushes the bounds of the links APIs by implementing some useful features not directly supported by the product. Most notably, the sample demonstrates the use of the links architecture on a range of text (using XML features to identify the range). It also demonstrates the implementation of links from an ODBC data source. The goal is to demonstrate bi-directional update of data fields (like prices) in a catalog directly to and from a data source. Instructions for using MySQL and FileMaker Pro databases are provided. Links added by the ExtendedLinks plug-in are displayed by the ExtendedLinksUI plug-in. The plug-in implements its own panel, separate from the LinksUI panel. The ExtendedLinksUI panel contains a tree view that groups links based on a link's URI. The previous links sample (CustomDataLink) was updated for CS4. Flex User Interface Preflight The FlexUIStroke sample is new in CS4. This sample demonstrates two-way communication between a Flash/Flex SWF and an InDesign plug-in. The sample's plug-in has a panel that contains an OWLFlashPlayerWidget and aggregates a SelectionObserver. The SelectionObserver notifies Flash when the selection changes in InDesign, and Flash notifies the observer when its combo-box selection changes. The FlexUIBasicScriptUI sample is new in CS4. This sample demonstrates two-way communication between a Flash/Flex SWF and an InDesign JavaScript script. The script creates a ScriptUI panel containing a flashplayer component. The flashplayer component provides a communication channel between the JavaScript and the SWF. This sample also demonstrates the use of scripting events to observe change; however, model and selection change events are not available to scripting, so the panel cannot maintain an updated state like a C++ plug-in panel can. We added initial sample code and documentation for the new preflight architecture. The PreflightRule sample plug-in demonstrates creating custom preflight rules. This new architecture is documented in the chapter on Implementing Preflight Rules in Adobe InDesign CS4 Products Programming Guide. Code Snippets SnpExportDynamicDocument is a new code snippet that shows how to programmatically export dynamic InDesign content to SWF. The snippet creates a multi-page document with several buttons and exports it to SWF. SnpManipulateConditionalText is a new code snippet that shows how to manipulate a document's conditional text. The snippet allows you to create, delete, and modify conditional-text tags and their visual attributes.
What s New in Adobe InDesign CS4 Products SDK Plug-ins 3 Plug-ins The FrameLabel sample was enhanced for CS4. Now you can specify a font color and label position (top, right, left, or bottom of the frame). The FrameLabelUI now supports mixed-mode operations; i.e., operations on frames with different FrameLabel settings. The Watermark sample is new for CS4. It demonstrates implementing a document watermark using a draw event handler. The sample allows you to set the watermark's text, font, color, opacity, rotation, and position. New APIs for PDF Form XObjects Open Folder PDF Form XObjects allow content to be added to a PDF file once and used later by reference. This is more efficient than duplicating static content. InDesign CS4's PDF export supports PDF Form XObjects. The IPDFFormXObjectData interface on the PDF export command (kpdfexportcmdboss) is used to add groups of static page items to the exported PDF as Form XObjects. Two InDesign features leverage this capability: Master Pages and Data Merge. All non-text, master page items are considered static content; therefore, they are added as Form XObjects. The text feature set supports dynamic features (like page numbers) in master text frames, which makes it hard to determine if a text frame is truly static; therefore, InDesign does not add master text frames to Form XObjects. If you can determine that a master text frame is static, you can use the IPDFFormXOjectData interface to add it to a PDF Form XObject, but be sure the content really is static; otherwise, it will be used incorrectly. Data merge now supports exporting directly to PDF without creating a document. This new feature creates Form XObjects for all static content (including text). Both features use an implementation of IPDFFormXObjectSetupProvider to populate the IPDFFormXOjectData. This is done through a service provider that provides the kpdfformxobjectsetupservice. A default implementation of this service provider is provided by the kpdfformxobjectsetupserviceimpl implementation. It is not possible to participate in the data-merge collection, even if you implement such a service. This is because data merge queries the service by ClassID. You can, however, participate in the standard PDF export by providing such a service. It is unlikely you will want to interact with the master-page feature's use of Form XObjects. You might consider building a feature that parallels data merge. In this case, you may want to re-use the service-provider approach to populate your data. The interfaces discussed above are found in the following locations: sdk/source/public/interfaces/graphics/ipdfformxobjectdata.h sdk/source/public/interfaces/graphics/ipdfformxobjectsetupprovider.h The SDK now contains source code for several InDesign user-interface plug-ins. The source code is saved under sdk/source/open. The actual project files are saved in the same directory as the SDK samples, but they contain.open. in their filenames.
What s New in Adobe InDesign CS4 Products SDK Improved DollyXs 4 Improved DollyXs The plug-in generation tool, DollyXs, was improved with the addition of 64-bit Windows project settings and preflight code generation. To learn more about DollyXs, see the DollyXs ReadMe file (devtools/sdktools/dollyxs/readme.txt). InDesign Server 64-bit Support (Windows only) The Windows version of this SDK includes 64-bit libraries for InDesign Server development. It also includes information on building 64-bit plug-ins in Adobe InDesign Server CS4 Plug-in Techniques. For your convenience, DollyXs now produce 64-bit targets in Windows project files. Documentation Reorganization The documents in the docs/guides folder were reorganized to allow for better online searching. Prior versions of the SDK contained many Working with... documents. These documents were combined into one new document, Adobe InDesign CS4 Solutions. Several other documents were added to Adobe InDesign CS4 Products Programming Guide. The root of the SDK also now contains a new document, Getting Started with the Adobe InDesign CS4 Products SDK.
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