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/

We have added a new feature to help work around a Finder issue in Mac OS X Snow Leopard which occurs when you double-click an InDesign document that has a ‘#’ character in its name.

Read more about it on the Adobe forums by clicking here

Download our latest version of Soxy:

http://www.rorohiko.com/soxy/

ShowPaths for Macintosh is a very simple app, with only one purpose: give you easy copy/paste access to the file path of a file or folder.

It’s released as donationware.

Have a look here for the download link:

http://www.rorohiko.com/showpaths

Soxy 1.0.4 for Macintosh adds support for EPS files. Thanks to Soxy, one can double-click an EPS file icon in the Finder – and any Photoshop EPS file will open in Photoshop; any Illustrator EPS files will open in Illustrator.

You can download Soxy from this page:

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

When that CD filled with EPS files arrives, there’s no more guessing. Simply double-click any EPS file’s icon – and Soxy will take care of it!

Here’s a small demo of how it could go.

I just upgraded my workstation to Soxy 1.0.4, but I have not configured it yet to handle EPS files.

Let’s do that first. The Soxy preferences screen can be accessed by simply double-clicking the Soxy application icon.

I now tick the Open with Soxy checkbox for the EPS file format – and from then on, my EPS file worries are over!

I have a disk with some images that originated on from a PC; when I mounted it on my desktop earlier, before I installed Soxy, I saw this:

With Soxy installed and configured, I can now simply select the two EPS file icons and double-click:

In a unnoticeable split second, Soxy analyzes both files, and hands them over to the proper applications. At the same time, it also updates the file icons to show which is which.

Turns out image1.eps is a Photoshop file, and image2.eps is an Illustrator file.

Try Soxy out today – once you’ve tried it, you will have a hard time imagining how you ever lived without it!

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

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/

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 adds a ‘character count’ feature, and fixes a potential crash of InDesign for users of CS and CS2.

Check it out – click here for more info:

http://www.rorohiko.com/framereporter

support@rorohiko.com will be slower than usual for the first three weeks of December. Depending on the availability of Internet and e-mail access it might be 48 hours or more before we can reply to your e-mails. Thanks for your understanding!

This week, we’ve updated TextExporter once more – the new frame-by-frame export feature in the previous versions was not as intelligent as it should be and we think we’ve now found a better approach to export the frames in a logical ‘reading order’ – try our new TextExporter 2.1.2. We also fixed a problem with the ‘Convert Text To Black’ option on some files.

Keep in mind: TextExporter is free, but you get some cool additional features by purchasing a license for APID ToolAssistant, which is only US$25 per installed copy of InDesign.

We’re pretty sure that TextExporter will save you much more than US$25 in time and effort – so if you can spare US$25, don’t hesitate, and purchase an APID ToolAssistant license, and help us fund further development. And, last but not least, a license gives you access to a number of cool additional features in our free TextExporter, ImageLibraryLoader, and LayerLifter plug-ins.

The StylePainter freebie plug-in also got a long overdue bug fix. In a way, StylePainter is like bringing InDesign CS4’s GREP styles to InDesign CS, CS2, CS3, but it is also markedly different – even with the GREP styles in CS4, it still remains useful in a number of workflows. Check it out!

Our new YeShore plug-in has been made available as a public beta. YeShore supports Adobe InDesign CS4 (Mac/Windows) and enhances the built-in Live Preflight function.

With Live Preflight, you can easily avoid numerous expensive mistakes and ruined print runs.

You can draw ‘lines in the sand’ – tell InDesign what the limitations of your project are. For example, you might know ahead of time that the number of pages needs to stay below a certain limit, or that it needs to be a multiple of the imposition signature page count.

Live Preflight will gently alert you in the heat of the moment, when you inadvertently make a mistake against the guidelines you’ve set. Live Preflight allows InDesign to become your guardian angle, and ‘watch over your shoulder’ while you work.

Our YeShore plug-in enhances Live Preflight a great deal. It adds a set of additional powerful design rules to the available rule set, because the built-in rule set of Live Preflight is good, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

For a limited time, during the beta-testing period you can purchase licenses to YeShore at a reduced rate of US$49 (instead of US$69).

Click here for more info:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/yeshore/

Click here to take advantage of this irresistible offer (don’t forget – the code to use is FRAME09), and to read more about FrameReporter click here!

InDesign Magazine is the magazine when it comes to learning how to use InDesign efficiently.

Sure, you can roam around the menu items and help files, and post questions on user forums, and with some luck you’ll actually find the feature you need.

But more often than not, you’ll miss an important feature or trick. Nothing beats knowledge and experience when it comes to finding your way around the vastness of InDesign. InDesign Magazine is one of the easiest ways to gain those.

It contains easy-to-read articles written by a host of well-known InDesign gurus – all down-to-earth people who  speak from experience, and who know how to explain things in plain English.