Accessing Adobe InDesign CS COM Objects from .NET

Introduction

This article shows how to access Adobe InDesign CS COM objects from .NET.

Background

I needed to make an application that read product information from a database and inserted it in an Adobe InDesign template to create a catalog ready for printing. There is not much information about this subject to be found on the Internet, so I thought I might share this article with you.

Note: Adobe InDesign CS and the InDesign SDK need to be installed on the development computer.

Using the Code

Create a new project in Visual Studio and make a reference to COM object 'Adobe InDesign CS Type Library'. The following code creates an instance of the InDesign application and gets the first textframe on the first page.

// create an InDesign instance
InDesign.Application app = 
    (InDesign.Application) COMCreateObject("InDesign.Application");

// get a reference to the current active document
InDesign.Document doc = app.ActiveDocument;

// get the first page
InDesign.Page page = (InDesign.Page) doc.Pages[1]; //1e pagina

// get the first textframe
InDesign.TextFrame frame = (InDesign.TextFrame) page.TextFrames[1];

// write contents of textframe
Console.WriteLine(frame.Contents.ToString());

// set contents of textframe
frame.Contents = "Andere content";

To create an instance of the InDesign COM object, I use the following code snippet:

/// <SUMMARY>
/// Creates a COM object given its ProgID.
/// </SUMMARY>
/// <param name="sProgID">The ProgID to create</param>
/// <RETURNS>The newly created object, or null on failure.</RETURNS>
public static object COMCreateObject (string sProgID)
{
    // We get the type using just the ProgID
    Type oType = Type.GetTypeFromProgID (sProgID);
    if (oType != null)
    {                    
        return Activator.CreateInstance( oType);
    }
    
    return null;
}