1

In your QuarkXPress or InDesign template, define the macro color C*11_Seasons. Here, we use macro *11, but we could have used any valid macro index from *01 to *30.

The appearance of this color is not important, as it is only a place holder and will never displayed as defined in the template.

2

In your template, define the 4 colors to use, depending on the season.

➢In the example on the right, we have named the 4 colors Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, to make it easier to refer to them later, in the macro we use to determine which color to use, based on the date of a token.

But we could have used any name, such as the Pantone color name which cannot be modified in InDesign.

3

In your template, add a macro index to any token whose color will need to change depending on the season.

➢Here, in the example on the right, we used macro *1, but we could have used any valid macro index from *01 to *30, as long as it was different from the macro index used for the macro color (*11 in the present example).

Note that the indices of the color macros (*11 in the present case) do not appear in any of the tokens.

4

After scanning your template, there are 2 messages related to the macro indices specified above.

We begin by specifying the macro for the *11 macro color.

The important aspect of any macro used for macro colors, as in the example below, is that it should return as sResult the exact name of a color as it is defined in your template, and bResult as true.

var
    nSeason
begin
    bResult = true
    nSeason = SeasonOf(n_TokenDate, 1, true)
    switch nSeason
        case 1
            sResult = 'Spring'
        case 2
            sResult = 'Summer'
        case 3
            sResult = 'Autumn'
        case 4
            sResult = 'Winter'
        else
            sResult = 'Paper'
    endswitch
end

5

For the resulting actions of the macro used for a macro color, we keep the default options, as shown on the right.

➢Note that any other group of resulting actions settings, such as Style, Font, Paragraph and Textbox, will be ignored for a color macro.

The only purpose of a color macro is to obtain a color name based on the date of a token.

6

We can now use the macro color(s) as any other color, once we have specified the macro to use for all the macro colors of our template (only one in the present example, but you can have as many macro color as you want).

We specify that the *1 macro should use the always true macro, as shown in steps 1 and 2 on the right.

Then we specify that the resulting action should be to change the text color to the color C*11_Seasons, as shown in step 3 on the right.

7

Once you generate the script you can see below that the tokens shown in step 3 change color based on the season of their date, as per the colors defined in step 2.