Accessing Adobe InDesign CS COM Objects from .NET





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An article showing how to access 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;
}
History
- 9th November, 2005: First publication