Lightning Brain StoryTweaker is a tool that allows for text edits of a master Adobe® InDesign® file by multiple users, without needing a copy of InDesign for the text edits.

LB StoryTweaker’s users include
• editors who want a document translated to another language, ie, English to Spanish
• designers who hand off a finished layout to writers that will provide the content
• writers/editors collaborating on a project

LB StoryTweaker is not meant as a replacement Adobe InCopy®. Even though there is some functional overlap between StoryTweaker and InCopy, StoryTweaker has a markedly different approach.

Visit the StoryTweaker page to download a fully functional time-limited demo:

http://storytweaker.com

A ‘Select All…’ page items in InDesign, of sorts.

Recently, Thomas Lambrecht (thomas@rorohiko.com) joined us here at Rorohiko as a junior software developer. His first project is now at a stage where we would like to allow anyone interested to have a play with it – so we’ve released an alpha version to the general public. Please let us know if this tool is useful, or if it is nearly useful (and then also tell us what is missing).

What is it about?

Well – who would like to do ‘Select All…’ and select all page items in an InDesign document?

Right now, you cannot do that. All you can do is ‘Select All…’ page items on a single spread, but you cannot select all page items in the document.

Hence, the Spreadulator – which offers a roundabout way to do that, and more. Click here for the download page.

Here’s how it works: you open a multi-spread document and then ’spreadulate’ it. You’ll end up with a copy of the original document which contains a single, massive spread that contains all your content.

Because everything is on a single spread, you can now do ‘Select All…’.

Work on the content to your heart’s desire, and when you’re done, reverse the operation (we call it ‘despreadulate) – and your document is ‘chopped’ into pieces, from a massive single spread, back to individual spreads.

Keep in mind that it is an alpha version – there are some situations the code cannot handle. We’d also love to receive any documents that don’t ’spreadulate’ correctly – preferrably we want documents that are not too massive. Please, send them to pluginsupport@rorohiko.com for us to try them out.

If you’re involved in automation around the Adobe Creative Suite, you need to mark the week of May 11 – 15, 2009 on your calendar – there’s another Creative Suite Developer Summit coming up in Seattle, on the Adobe Fremont Campus

We’re running two training sessions this year – click the lines below for more info:

On May 11: InDesign Plugin Development Workshop – Getting Started With The InDesign SDK

On May 15: Feature Development for InDesign Using ExtendScript

Both workshops are limited to 12 seats, which will be allocated on a first come, first served basis – so don’t delay booking.

More about the Adobe Creative Suite Developer Conference can be found here:

http://niemannross.host.adobe.com/2009csbuDeveloperSummit/

Space is limited – so keep a close eye, and make sure you enroll early.

Unless we bump into some major issues, Lightning Brain StoryTweaker will come out of the beta phase, and will be officially released on March 1, 2009.

Lightning Brain StoryTweaker is a tool that allows for text edits of a master Adobe® InDesign® file by multiple users, without needing a copy of InDesign for the text edits.

LB StoryTweaker is available for both PCs and Macs, and helps edit the text content of an InDesign document, no matter which platform it was created on.

LB StoryTweaker’s users include
• editors who want a document translated to another language, ie, English to Spanish
• designers who hand off a finished layout to writers that will provide the content
• writers/editors collaborating on a project

LB StoryTweaker is not meant as a replacement Adobe InCopy®. Even though there is some functional overlap between StoryTweaker and InCopy, StoryTweaker has a markedly different approach.

Our European distributor is SYSPRO gmbh (http://gmbh.sysprogroup.de/); Rorohiko Ltd. will service the rest of the world, including the US. The price is US$99.00 per seat.

Read more about it here:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/?p=59

The current beta and the upcoming release are to be found here:

http://storytweaker.com

To buy: simply download a demo version from the page above, and click ‘Get License…’ to purchase a license.

For more info, click on the links below to e-mail:

(Europe): SYSPRO gmbh

(US and the rest of the world): Rorohiko Sales