Can Any Graphic Designers Suggest Things They Use Keyboard Maestro For?

Questions & Suggestions
1

The geek in me thinks this is amazing and wants it right now. The graphic designer in me can't really think what I would use it for.

So, fellow designers, are you using Keyboard Maestro and what are you using it to do?

One thing I could think of was batch triggering pre-press and outlining text of PDFs.

The only other thing was somehow using this to bypass an issue I'm having with google drive. Long story short, the desktop app isn't working so I need to manually upload everything via the web app. Feel like there would be no way of setting this up to know where specific files specifically needed to go within the 100s of folders across the 2 drive accounts I'm using, even if I could schedule some sort of workflow to take anything I'd saved throughout the day and put it on the drive via the web app.

Would such a thing somehow be possible?

Thanks!

2

I only recently started using Keyboard Maestro and I haven't been using InDesign much lately (once I have more print projects in the queue, I can think of a bunch of things I want to automate), but I created one right off the bat to run "Fill Frame Proportionally" and "Fit Frame to Content" (Fill Frame, Fit Frame) in succession, and another to run "Fit Content Proportionally" and "Fit Frame to Content" (Fit Content, Fit Frame) in succession:

ID)Fill Frame, Fit Frame.kmmacros (3.9 KB)

ID)Fit Content, Fit Frame.kmmacros (3.9 KB)

I also created a couple that run Photoshop droplets on the current selection in Finder, and one that takes every subdirectory in a specific folder and generates a source set images based on how large the original image is. Most of the work for this one is done by Photoshop's built-in scripting since I wrote the original 5 or 6 years ago—it's just more convenient to trigger it using KM.

3

I use Keyboard Maestro with InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat.

InDesign

  • Export pdfs with different settings.
  • Package files and zip them afterwards.
  • Run JavaScripts. Sometimes with automation which writes the JavaScript first. It contains Keyboard Maestro variables which has been picked up in another program.
  • Insert current selection from Word in InDesign.

Illustrator

  • Running automation to copy currently selected text. Wait for me to select and object. Move object to layer named the previously selected text.

Acrobat

  • Various shortcuts when preparing PDF-files to adhere to the PDF-UA/WCAG standard.
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