If you’re involved in automation around the Adobe Creative Suite, you need to mark the week of May 3 to May 7, 2010 on your calendar – there’s another Adobe Creative Suite Developer Summit (aka CSBU Developer Summit) coming up in Seattle, at the Adobe Fremont Campus.

For the third year in a row, we’ll be running our acclaimed Getting Started With The InDesign SDK workshop during the summit – click this link for more info:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/workshop-getting-started-with-the-indesign-sdk/

Familiarizing yourself with the InDesign SDK takes many months of hard work and study. This workshop will slash a substantial amount from the time it takes to gain a good understanding and get properly started. Make sure you enroll as soon as possible – there is only room for 12 participants!

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

http://www.adobe.com/go/2010csbuDevSummit/

TextExporter is a plug-in for InDesign CS, CS2, CS3 or CS4. It allows you to export all the text from an InDesign document concatenated into a single RTF file, while following a natural reading order. Text files and InDesign Tagged Text are also supported.

The latest version adds support for properly exporting the bullets or numbers that are created by using bulleted and numbered paragraph styles in InDesign – normally, these bullets vanish from the resulting RTF file when exported.

Read all about it at

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/indesign-downloads/text-exporter/

TextExporter is a free plug-in for InDesign that export all the stories of an InDesign document into a single file (RTF, InDesign Tagged Text or plain text).

The recent upgrades worked a lot faster than before when used with InDesign/InCopy CS3 and CS4 – but it turns out things were broken in InDesign/InCopy CS and CS2. Also, frame-by-frame export did not account for text in anchored frames.

Version 2.1.1 corrects that. Get it the latest and the greatest here:

http://www.rorohiko.com/textexporter

Turns out that our recent update for the free TextExporter plug-in for InDesign was running much, much slower than it should on any reasonably sized document. Version 2.0.9 fixes this abnormal slowdown. Go to get it here:

http://www.rorohiko.com/textexporter

TextExporter is a free plug-in for InDesign that export all the stories of an InDesign document into a single file (RTF, InDesign Tagged Text or plain text).

Download it here : http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/downloads/lightning-brain-soxy

Changes since 0.2.0b:

• Fixed bug where selections go white on some lists.
• Fixed bug where setting Soxy as the default app crashed the program.
• Some other minor bug fixes.

There’s a common problem when there are multiple versions of applications like Adobe® InDesign®, QuarkXPress®, Adobe Illustrator®… installed on the same computer.

Double-clicking a file’s icon will often cause the wrong application version to launch. As a result, you might unwittingly re-save a document into a more recent file format, which could be a bad thing. Maybe it’s a customer file, and the customer might not be able to open the updated file when you e-mail it back to her.

Download it here : http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/downloads/lightning-brain-soxy

There’s a common problem when there are multiple versions of applications like Adobe® InDesign®, QuarkXPress®, Adobe Illustrator®… installed on the same computer.

Double-clicking a file’s icon will often cause the wrong application version to launch. As a result, you might unwittingly re-save a document into a more recent file format, which could be a bad thing. Maybe it’s a customer file, and the customer might not be able to open the updated file when you e-mail it back to her.

To work around this problem we’ve created Soxy. – originally for Mac OS X only. Due to a large number of requests we have now also built a Windows version. The Windows version is brand new – there is not even a Readme.txt yet, and lots of loose ends, but it’s fairly functional. Stay tuned – more coming soon!

Our ever more popular TextExporter tool has had a face-lift. TextExporter is a free plug-in for Adobe InCopy and Adobe InDesign that allows you to export all text from an InDesign file to a single file – in either Text, RTF or InDesign Tagged Text format

Yes, you read that right – you can use TextExporter with InCopy as well as with InDesign!

For users of CS3 and above, this latest version has an improved method for concatenating the InDesign content into a single RTF document. As a result the RTF export has better fidelity for users of CS3 and CS4. It’s still very much WYSSRWG (What You See Somewhat Resembles What You Get) but generally speaking, it’ll look closer to the original.

Furthermore, for those people who have (or will have) purchased the optional US$25 license for APID ToolAssistant, there are two additional features.

First of all, you can opt to export an InDesign document in frame-by-frame order instead of the default story-by-story order, so for some documents, the resulting RTF export file can be visually a bit closer to the original layout.

Secondly, you can convert all text to black during export – which is helpful when the InDesign document contains white text above a dark backdrop. Such white text becomes normally invisible in the exported RTF file, but with this new option, that’s a problem of the past.

More info and download links can be found by clicking here:

http://www.rorohiko.com/textexporter

Download it from here

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.

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

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.

Changes since 1.0.1 include:

• Improved performance.
• Improved user interface.
• Added support for footnotes.
• Smaller assignments.
• Fixed support for tables.
• And much more…

Visit the StoryTweaker page to download the latest Release.

http://www.storytweaker.com

We’ve just released an update to the APID ToolAssistant plug-in – version 1.0.47.

This plug-in has no end-user features; it is mainly an invisible, yet critical component of many popular InDesign plug-ins, both developed by us or by other software developers.

As such, APID ToolAssistant provides support for many of our popular tools, like TextExporter, StoryParker, MagnetoGuides, FrameReporter…

If you are using any tools that rely on APID ToolAssistant, please update to the latest and greatest. In the 1.0.47 release, we’ve concentrated on performance and stability. The few new features we’ve added are mainly of interest to software developers who use APID ToolAssistant as a component for their tools.

In our own range of tools, especially FrameReporter benefits from using the latest APID ToolAssistant – the little info-labels now remain better ‘attached’ to the associated frame, even when rotated or stretched, and APID ToolAssistant now avoids drawing information ‘upside-down’.

Click here for more info about APID ToolAssistant.

Soxy for Macintosh has some new features.

The latest version knows how to handle InDesign .jsx script files. Instead of stashing your .jsx files into the InDesign Scripts Panel folder, you can now simply tell the Mac Finder to assign the .jsx file name extension to be opened with Soxy.

Soxy then looks inside the .jsx file for any comments that indicate the version of InDesign the script is destined for, and it then runs the .jsx file with that version.

This means that InDesign .jsx files become almost like little stand-alone applications: you can store them wherever you like on your hard disk, and simply double-clicking them will make the script run inside the proper copy of InDesign.

Soxy must be able to guess what version of InDesign needs to be launched – it will scan the beginning of the .jsx script file for comment lines like

// InDesign CS4

or

// InDesign 6.0

or entries like

#target indesign-6

and use these to decide what version of InDesign this script ‘belongs to’. Most script .jsx files have such a comment – and if they don’t you can always open them in a text editor and add such a line at the beginning of the script.

Make way for double-clickable .jsx files!

For more info click here.