The Legalese Robot

[email protected] is an account at Google.

It makes use of two services: Drive and Gmail.

Under Drive, a script runs once a minute to move new “Shared With Me” folders into “My Drive / incoming”.

At any time, anyone on the Internet can share with the Robot a folder containing a specially formatted XML file.

The Robot will accept the folder share.

The InDesign “Server”

There exists a Mac Mini running InDesign Desktop Edition (as opposed to Server Edition). It runs an xml2pdf-sleep.jsx script, which notices new XML files and converts them to PDF.

It also runs the Google Drive service in the background, syncing its drive to the local filesystem.

The Legalese Robot’s XML-to-PDF Workflow

So, the steps are:

1. User runs “Generate PDFs”.
2. The Google App code.gs creates a new folder in Google Drive.
3. The Google App code.gs obtains and fills the XML templates.
4. The XML templates get saved into the new folder.
5. The Google App shares the new folder with [email protected].
6. [email protected] has a spreadsheet called “browser”.
7. A Google Apps script is bound to that spreadsheet.
8. The browser script is called robot-legalese.gs.
9. It is configured to run once a minute.
10. It looks for folders that have been “Shared With Me”.
11. It accepts those folders into “My Drive”.
12. [email protected]’s Google Drive on the Mac Mini syncs the folder to local disk.
13. InDesign’s xml2pdf-sleep.jsx notices the new XML in that folder.
14. xml2pdf-sleep.jsx converts the XML to PDF and saves the PDF into the same folder.
15. The resulting PDF gets synced by the Google Drive app back into the cloud.
16. The end-user observes the PDF has appeared in the new folder.

Security Considerations

The robot should probably only accept folder shares from trusted senders.

INSTALL – InDesign robot on a mac

A caveat before you do this – the robot is not yet designed to run in parallel; it assumes only one instance is running at any time. If you run multiple instances you may end up with google drive sync conflicts PDFs. However, as long as the PDFs are there, the main Google Apps scripts should be able to perform.

To set up a new instance of the InDesign robot,

install InDesign CC 2014

install a bunch of fonts that are used by the templates

adobe text pro

adobe text pro italic

install Google Drive and sync:

20161003-10:50:04 robot@venice2:~/Google Drive% ls -l total 688 -rw-r–r–@ 1 robot staff 0 Oct 3 10:28 Icon? -rw------- 1 robot staff 247 Oct 3 08:59 browser.gsheet drwxr-xr-x 211 robot staff 7174 Oct 3 10:48 done drwxr-xr-x 25 robot staff 850 Oct 3 10:48 incoming 20161003-10:50:09 robot@venice2:~/Google Drive%

configure Google Drive to run noninteractively

under Preferences, Advanced, uncheck “Show confirmation when removing items from shared folders”

if you don’t do this, every time the InDesign script deletes a .xml file, Google Drive will helpfully pop up a modal dialog and stop operating. Super annoying.

clone the repo

you may need to xcode-select --install

mkdir -p src/l tmp/build
cd src/l
git clone https://github.com/legalese/legalese-indesign.git

set up the scripts

20161003-10:53:21 robot@venice2:~/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 10.0/en_US/Scripts/Scripts Panel% ln -s ~/non-db-src/l/legalese-indesign/scripts/xml2pdf{-sleep,-lib,}.jsx . 20161003-10:53:23 robot@venice2:~/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 10.0/en_US/Scripts/Scripts Panel% ls -al total 24 drwxr-xr-x 5 robot staff 170 Oct 3 10:53 . drwxr-xr-x 3 robot staff 102 Oct 3 10:24 .. lrwxr-xr-x 1 robot staff 58 Oct 3 10:53 xml2pdf-lib.jsx -> /Users/robot/non-db-src/l/indesign/scripts/xml2pdf-lib.jsx lrwxr-xr-x 1 robot staff 60 Oct 3 10:53 xml2pdf-sleep.jsx -> /Users/robot/non-db-src/l/indesign/scripts/xml2pdf-sleep.jsx lrwxr-xr-x 1 robot staff 54 Oct 3 10:53 xml2pdf.jsx -> /Users/robot/non-db-src/l/indesign/scripts/xml2pdf.jsx

make sure the XML Rules glue code is installed

a copy of the XML Rules folder is available in this repo.

20161003-10:56:42 robot@venice2:/Applications/Adobe InDesign CC 2014/Scripts/XML Rules% ls -al total 80 drwxrwxr-x 5 root admin 170 Jan 30 2016 . drwxrwxr-x 8 root admin 272 Oct 3 10:43 .. -rw-rw-r– 1 root admin 3668 Jan 30 2016 glue code.jsx -rw-rw-r– 1 root admin 26804 Jan 30 2016 glue code.scpt -rw-rw-r– 1 root admin 5642 Jan 30 2016 glue code.vbs

create the build directory

mkdir -p ~/tmp/build

later, the script will output an indesignlog.txt to here

from the scripts panel in InDesign, run xml2pdf-sleep.jsx

STOPPING

• is a previous run running? if you see Google Drive/incoming/i-am-running.txt, then it probably is.
• to get the previous run to stop, in Google Drive/incoming/, touch stop-please.txt
• the xml2pdf-sleep.jsx script should notice that .txt file after a minute and shut down gracefully.
• if the script is hosed it won’t pick that up, so Force Quit it after a minute.

STARTING

• switch to InDesign
• locate the Scripts panel – it should already be open. it’s the one that has a big S on it.
• double-click xml2pdf-sleep.jsx
• you will receive confirmation in the form of a dialog box.
• you can try to make the dialog box go away but clicking on the button will probably have no effect.

view the indesignlog file

20161003-11:06:18 mengwong@venice2:~/non-db-src/l/indesign% perl -ple ‘s/\r+/\n/g’ ~/non-db-src/l/build/indesignlog.txt | less