Yes, I've asked for it and here is the answer.  Thanks Jongware!

Best Regards

Roland

I'm definitely seeing some weirdness, though (in CS5 7.0.4 on Mac 10.6.8). If I do this:

app.selection[0].appliedParagraphStyle.previewColor = UIColors.YELLOW

I see this:

Not yellow. If I assign an RGB value, like [255, 0, 0], it takes, but doesn't display any highlight color. I checked how other things, like xmlTags, that use the UIColors, look, and the colors do display properly there.

Does anyone else see this?

Nice find!

I'm also seeing color offset, also, colors from GRID_BLUE and beyond, doesn't work.

var
    mD = app.activeDocument,
    pS = mD.paragraphStyles, pSn,
    tB = mD.textFrames.add ( { geometricBounds: [0, 0, "200mm", "200mm"] } );
 
mD.textPreferences.enableStylePreviewMode = true;
    
for each ( color in UIColors ) {
    try { pSn = pS.add ( { name: color.toString () } ); } catch ( _ ) { pSn = pS.itemByName ( color.toString () ) };
    pSn.previewColor = color ;
    tB.insertionPoints [-1].contents = "Test " + color.toString () + "\r";
    tB.paragraphs [-1].appliedParagraphStyle = pS.itemByName ( color.toString () );
}

--

Marijan (tomaxxi)

Ok. Now I tested with InDesign CS4 and CS5. In CS4 the right UIColors were applied, CS5 and CS5.5  wrong colors. Seems to be a bug that sneeked in when CS5 came out.

Uwe

There is an order to how the UIColors are off, though—they're all off by two. This works (although LIGHT_BLUE and RED are gone); I ran it on a document with an empty text frame.

function main() {
    var doc = app.activeDocument,
        colors = [],
        map = {},
        story = doc.stories[0],
        i, style;
 
    for (i in UIColors) {
        colors[colors.length] = UIColors[i];
    }
 
    for (i = 2; i < colors.length; i++) {
        map[colors[i].toString()] = colors[i - 2];
    }
        
    for (i in map) {
        style = doc.paragraphStyles.add({name: i});
        style.previewColor = map[i];
        story.insertionPoints[-1].contents = "UIColors." + i + "\r";
        story.paragraphs[-1].appliedParagraphStyle = style;
    }
 
    doc.textPreferences.enableStylePreviewMode = true;
}
 
app.doScript(main, ScriptLanguage.JAVASCRIPT, undefined, UndoModes.ENTIRE_SCRIPT, "Show Preview Colors");

Then I guess the person who isn't me who is making the dialog to manage this could at least use e.g. UIColors.GREEN for CS4 and map.GREEN for CS5.

That's utterly cool! Thanks for sharing!

Jongware,

the conversion to those files was probably undertaken to get away from OSX Carbon resource manager which is not thread safe and not available as 64bit version. Why Adobe did not implement anything less wasteful is beyond me, but they are again in good company with Apple, who uses packages / folder hierarchies galore where frugal old school developers stuffed everything into a single resource fork.

On the other hand CS5.5 takes about two seconds to launch on my current Mac (with SSD) while CS4 took about 30 seconds on an old disk based machine.