Export selection to JPEG

I think that title already says everything about this post 😀 and I’ll try to be short. When you are exporting from InDesign GUI you have option to export just selected objects, but how to achieve this from script? 😕 This script is also published on Adobe’s InDesign scripting forum.

We know that we can export things from InDesign like this: app.exportFile();, but, that exports entire document, or selected pages, and how to export just selected items? First, PDF doesn’t allow us to export selection, I only tested this script with JPEG! Feature that allows us to export selected object to JPEG is: app.selection[0].exportFile();. If our selection contains more than one object, this command will export just first object from selection, so we must first group selected objects, and then export selected group. And at the end, if we group objects from multiple layers, objects are moved to one layer, and if we ungroup objects after export, they are not returned to layers they belong, so best way is just to undo grouping operation. And here is the code:

if(app.selection.length > 1){
    var myObj = app.activeWindow.activePage.groups.add(app.selection);
    myObj.exportFile(ExportFormat.JPG, myFile, false);
    app.activeDocument.undo();
}else{
    app.selection[0].exportFile(ExportFormat.JPG, myFile, false);
}

Yeah, this is really handy little snippet 🙂

Have fun! 😀

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