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

FrameReporter uses little non-printing labels to display interesting info about selected page items, right in your work area.  Normally InDesign makes you click around and find various palettes to dig up the info – which disrupts your train of thought.

With FrameReporter, the relevant info is displayed exactly in the area where you are working, and you can immediately see the necessary info for multiple items in the blink of an eye.

For example: FrameReporter will show overset text warnings on the edge of any text frame that is part of a linked set of frames.

This latest version fixed a number of bugs and also has substantial speed improvements – the previous version was causing noticeable delays.

Check it out – click here for more info:

http://www.rorohiko.com/framereporter

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.

Our LayerLifter freebie is a simple plug-in for Adobe InDesign that offers an alternative method for moving page items between layers, instead of using the InDesign Layers palette.

With LayerLifter, the names of the document layers appear in the context menu of any selected page item. You can move a page item between layers by right-clicking and selecting a layer name from the context menu.

This updated version adds an optional feature to nudge all items on a layer throughout the whole document, or across the current spread – only users that have a license for APID ToolAssistant installed have access to this optional feature.

To see a little bit more about this new feature, check this out – it’s a little article that explains how to nudge a whole collection of frames in one swoop:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/2009/10/29/how-to-nudge-and-shift-a-whole-layer/

More info about LayerLifter can be found here:

http://www.rorohiko.com/layerlifter

The latest version of our LayerLifter tool includes an optional layer shifter feature, which allows you to do document-wide ‘layer nudging’

Imagine you made a picture grid layout, with captions below the pictures – something like this:

You’ve put pictures into the picture frames (to do that fast, you might have used our ImageLibraryLoader tool), and the caption text is all neatly styled using a paragraph style Caption.

The caption frames are on their own separate layer.

Imagine there are many tens of pages like this. Now, for the sake of the argument, suppose we want to make the caption frames overlap the pictures instead of sitting underneath.

First select the API – LayerLifter – Preferences menu item, and make sure the Drag Attached Layer On All Spreads option is enabled.

Select any one of the caption frames, and then pick the API – LayerLifter – Attach To Layer menu item.

The caption frame should now display a little paperclip icon near its top left corner.

The caption frame is now ‘attached’ to the layer it is on – anytime you move this particular frame, you will ‘drag’ the whole layer along, as well as any other page items on that layer.

Drag the caption frame so it overlaps the picture above it. As soon as you let go of the mouse button, all other caption frames on all pages will shift the same amount – so they now all overlap – they were all on the same layer, so they all move along. (Yeah, I know the result does not look good – good thing this is only a dummy layout just for the sake of the demo, eh).

Finally, with the attached caption frame still selected, use the API – LayerLifter -Detach From Layer menu item to remove the paperclip, and detach the caption frame from its layer.

Important: this layer shifter feature is only enabled for LayerLifter users that also have a valid APID ToolAssistant license installed.

ImageLibraryLoader 1.0.6 fixes an issue that occurs when you try to paste from an InDesign library into the same frame a second time – the second paste did not work with the previous version. This version fixes that issue.

ImageLibraryLoader is a free plug-in for InDesign allows you to quickly set up a floating palette filled with images from one or more designated folders. In many cases, it is much faster than Adobe Bridge, as it uses standard InDesign library palette – so there is no external app to launch.

ImageLibraryLoader and ImageHorn, another free plug-in we have on offer, work great as a combo – read all about it in this post:

How to Populate a Template With Images in No Time At All

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!

We’ve been hard at work these last few months – a beta of StoryTweaker, a new version of TextExporter, and also a new version of FrameReporter for InDesign.

This update adds the ability to display the image file name and/or the image file path next to any placed image on the InDesign page.

Here’s a sample of what it can do for you – imagine you’ve been asked to place a whole lot of images, and it’s really important that the images are placed on the pages in alphabetical order of their file name.

The problem is that the images look very similar, and carry similar names – how do you verify quickly you’ve placed them correctly?

Furthermore, all images should be placed at the exact same scaling factor, so their effective resolution is the same. Again, how do you quickly find that out if there are any outliers?

Here’s a screen shot of my InDesign page – I can immediately see that DSC_8755 is out of order, that it is missing (hence the red background behind the name) and that the fourth image has been scaled to a different effective resolution than the other three.

With FrameReporter, it takes all of two seconds: Select All, and quickly inspect the file names.

And rest assured – these little labels are purely informational, and they are non-printing – they won’t appear on the printed page.

FrameReporter uses little non-printing labels to display interesting info about selected page items.  A lot of this info can also be found on the various InDesign palettes – but you need to click around to dig up the info. With FrameReporter, the relevant info is displayed exactly in the area where you are working, and you can immediately see the necessary info for multiple items in the flick of an eye.

Another example: FrameReporter will show overset text warnings on the frame of any text frame that’s part of a linked set of frames.

Check it out – click here for more info:

http://www.rorohiko.com/framereporter

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