InDesign Applescript: "override master page items" glitch?

Question

Here's a very simple script that overrides all master page items on page 1: tell application id "com.adobe.InDesign" tell active document override every item of master page items of page 1 destination page page 1 end tell end tell For some reason, this results in the page items shifting up and to the left of their original location. I cannot figure out why this is happening. Overriding page items should NEVER move the items. In fact, when I manually override in InDesign, nothing shifts. It appears to be affecting a specific layout. When I do a test document, the problem goes away. This particular document has many levels of master pages applied to each other, then applied to a layout. Anyone else encountered this issue?

Answer 1

When you use the programmatic override command in AppleScript (or Extend Script/JavaScript) on documents with nested/multi-level master pages (a master applied to a master), relative origin offsets or custom ruler origins aren't calculated correctly. InDesign applies the transformation matrix of the nested master page hierarchy again during the script execution, causing the overridden objects to shift up and to the left (or drift off according to master-to-master page margins).

Because manual overrides via the UI use a different internal method than the API's override() method, doing it by hand works fine.