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Table Of Contents

PlanetPress Talk

PlanetPress Talk is a complete scripting language that opens the door to more powerful and sophisticated documents.

Please note, as of October 20th 2011, the PlanetPress Talk Reference Guide has been merged with the PlanetPress

Design User Guide. This chapter now contains the language reference and more details about our scripting language.

You can use PlanetPress Talk expressions in many places in the documents you create in PlanetPress Design. You can enter a

PlanetPress Talk expression in any text box with a maroon label. You can also include complete PlanetPress Talk programs in

your document. This provides the power and flexibility that make even the most complex documents possible in PlanetPress

Design. You enter PlanetPress Talk programs when you create a user-defined emulation, and when you edit the PlanetPress

Talk properties of an object, a page, a document, or a condition. When you edit the PlanetPress Talk properties, you can enter

PlanetPress Talk code directly, or through the PlanetPress Talk Editor. Finally, you can also write your own PlanetPress Talk

functions from PlanetPress Design, making it easy to extend the language to suit the requirements of your particular document

or documents. When you write programs in PlanetPress Talk, you should work through the logic of the program you intend to

create before you start coding. This ensures the program accomplishes what you intend it to accomplish, and makes the cod-

ing morestraightforward. It can also result in insights into different ways of accomplishing the same task, or raise issues that

were not immediately apparent. Note that PlanetPress Talk is case-insensitive.

When a user-defined emulation is used with metadata, results and behavior are unknown and unsupported. For

instance, refreshing the metadata file may cause the document to crash and/or corrupt. For this reason, it is strongly

advised to create backup copies of your documents beforehand.

This chapter introduces the PlanetPress Talk scripting language, describes where and how you can enter PlanetPress Talk

code in PlanetPress, explains its syntax and each of its elements, and offers some tips and tricks for writing PlanetPress Talk

scripts.

Variable PlanetPressTalk Properties

You can enter a PlanetPress Talk expression in any parse field. Parse fields can be identified by their maroon field label text.

(note that maroon is a default setting that you can modify in the User Options dialog box).

A. Maroon label

The following procedure describes how to enter a PlanetPress Talk expression in such a text box. You can enter the complete

PlanetPress Talk expression by hand, build it using items from the menu that appears when you right-click in the text box, or

create it using a combination of the two. For help with PlanetPress Talk, consult the PlanetPress Talk Language Ref-

erence.

The menu that appears when you right-click in the text box contains some or all of the following items.

Choose: To:

Data Selec-

tion

Launch the Data Selector and create a data selection to insert in the PlanetPress Talk expression.

Get Data

Launch the Data Selector and retrieve characters to insert in the PlanetPress Talk expression. The string you

retrieve is static.

PlanetPress Talk