Rorohiko Ltd.

The Lightning Brain Sudoku Generator has been updated to version 1.1.0 – this latest version adds support for 6×6 sudoku, with 3×2 (HxV) subcells. 6×6 sudoku puzzles are smaller, and less intensive to solve than their 9×9 brethern – I estimate they would take the average puzzler about a minute or less to solve. Good fun when you only have a minute to spare! Click here for more info.

Here’s one to try – the clues in this puzzle are arranged in a visually symmetrical pattern: more pleasing to the eye, but that makes the puzzle also a bit easier to solve. If you want slightly more difficult 6×6 puzzles, you should not use the visual symmetry-options that our generator offers.

Lightning Brain 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.

Do you need to work on a large, complex document, with many large chunks of text?

FrameReporter helps you navigate around – attach a name to various text stories or text frames, and use a simple popup menu to ‘jump to’ any named story or text frame – jump from the story on ‘Global Warming’ around page 56 to the story on ‘Organic Pet Food’ around page 70 and back.

Also, InDesign shows a lot of information on its many floating palettes and ribbons – but have you noticed you always need to take your eyes off the current selection to consult a palette?

FrameReporter puts the info where you need it – I’d say ‘right at your fingertips eyeballs’

Imagine a multi-text frame story – how can you know whether the text overruns or not without having to scroll way to the last frame, while you’re removing some superfluous words to clear the text overrun? FrameReporter shows you where you need it – it puts a special ‘overrun marker’ on any selected frame that is part of an overrunning story.

Download a fully functional, time limited demo today – click here for a web page with download links and a cookbook description of the FrameReporter features.

Lightning Brain InDesignProxy 1.0.7 is available for download!

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 Lightning Brain 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.

We’ve just released Lightning Brain FrameReporter 1.0.1 for Adobe InDesign CS, CS2, CS3 or CS4.

Have you ever worked with a long text story that spanned multiple text frames? Did you have fun with overset text?

How about taking a superfluous word away from frame 7, then zooming to the last frame – frame 223 – to check whether the overset is resolved. Nah, still overset. Ok, let’s reword this sentence in frame 123 – better? Back to frame 223 to check. And so on…

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could continually see whether the current story is or isn’t overset? Glad you asked – that’s just one of the things LB FrameReporter does.

You can also click here for a more extensive discussion of the LB FrameReporter features.

LB FrameReporter adds a little, non-printing ‘info-label’ to the currenly selected frame, and this info-label can contain all kinds of info – overset warnings, story roadmap, master page info,…

We’ve just released a new freebie. It’s called Lightning Brain ImageHorn (’horn’ like in shoehorn). If you find yourself re-applying ‘Fit Content To Frame’ each time you resize an image frame, LB ImageHorn is for you: it allows you to make the image frame fitting options dynamic.

LB ImageHorn will automatically re-apply the selected fitting option to the frame each time you resize it, instead of forcing you to re-apply the fitting option after you’ve resized the image frame. Click here for more info.

Lightning Brain ImageLibraryLoader is one of our freebies – it handles a floating library-palette filled with images that are automatically retrieved from one or more folders; a bit like a fast and lean mini-version of Adobe Bridge.

The free Lightning Brain ImageLibraryLoader has been updated to better support InDesign CS4. The main issue that we fixed was a CS4-specific problem where all imported assets carried the name ‘Untitled’. Click here for more info and for the download links.

There’s a common problem on Mac OS X when there are multiple versions of Adobe® InDesign® or Adobe® InCopy® installed on the same computer. Double-clicking an .indd file’s icon will often cause the wrong application to launch.

The horror scenario: your customer sends you their InDesign CS2 file; you double-click it. It opens in the brand new copy of InDesign CS4 you just installed on your Mac. You work on the file for two days, and send it back to your customer. They cannot open it – they only have InDesign CS2. The fun starts…

To fix this, we’ve been building a little app called Lightning Brain InDesignProxy; we had a rapid succession of ever-improving versions over the last month, but things seem to have settled – we’ve had no bug reports for a while now. Click here for more info.

We’ve released it as ‘cup-of-coffee’-ware: if you like the app, and it saves you time, we’d appreciate a nice ‘Latte Grande’ with bells and whistles – come back to the Lightning Brain InDesignProxy page and send us a US$4 donation to show your appreciation.

On the other hand, if you hate the app, or it does not work for you – please send us feedback at support@rorohiko.com; we would really appreciate that!

Check it out – click here to read more and to download it!

Lightning Brain TextExporter now supports Adobe® InCopy® as well as Adobe® InDesign®, for any version between CS and CS4.

The latest version is 2.0.7. For more info and/or download, click here.