When I was new to programming, "regular expressions" is something that intimidated me for quite some time. All those squiggly lines, slashes, and brackets made me fallen in love with it. It was lengthy and comprehensive regular expression tutorials that scared me. Regular expressions are like Italian cooking. You start with a few essential ingredients, but you can mix them up in a correct order to create a complex dish. (more..)

In the previous post I wrote about how to connect to inDesign web services using ColdFusion. But if your inDesign server is running on a deferent IP from your ColdFusion server, you might get an error: Cannot perform web service invocation runScript. ColdFusion gives you this message not because your network administrator blocked the port 18383, you know the it's open because you can access http://my-indesign-server-ip-goes-here:18383/service?wsdl from the ColdFusion box. (more..)

I was generating InDesign JSX files with Coldfusion, to create pdfs that happened to have Unicode characters in it. That is not a difficult task, but rather boring one, until I realize, I cannot use Unicode characters inside InDesign JavaScript file. JSX only accept Unicode characters by their "glyph id number" or "code point" or whatever the name you geeks prefer to call it. (more..)

I was trying to connect to inDesign server with ColdFusion today, realize there are no code examples in CFM. There are php, java and other language examples in adobe site, but not CFM. This is not the first time I noticed that. When adobe released Spry framework before CF 8, Adobe labs most graciously released php and .net examples, but there were no CFM either. (more..)