APID ToolAssistant
APID ToolAssistant is free when used with any of the Rorohiko free tools.
You need this plug-in installed with your copy of InDesign in order to be able to use most of the free InDesign tools you can find here, on the Rorohiko web site.
IMPORTANT: Please read try to read this whole web page, or at least up to ‘What is it?‘. If you don’t do that, there’s a good chance it won’t work, or you’ll get stuck, or you’ll misunderstand some important details.
Knowing human nature – if and when that happens, please come back here and read the info – all is explained here.
You can save your own time by reading the info up front. If you’re not able to spare the time, we would ask that you read at the very least the ‘Licensing’ section some ways further below. It contains important information. We’ve kept it all as brief and to the point as possible.
Download APID ToolAssistant (version 1.0.46 – Includes versions for Mac, Windows, InDesign CS, InDesign CS2, InDesign CS3 and InDesign CS4.
When used with Rorohiko’s freebies, a license is optional – no license payment is required.
When used with third party tools, you will need to purchase a license, either directly from us or via the third party.
Please take some time to read the section ‘Licensing’ further below.)
Installing
You probably ended up here because you’re trying to install an APIDToolAssistant-supported tool.
The first thing to do is to install APIDToolAssistant in your InDesign Plug-Ins folder (you can also use a subfolder of the Plug-Ins folder). After downloading, you need to decompress the .ZIP file.
You might need to decompress some more .ZIP archives that are nested inside of the decompressed result. On a Mac, you also might need to mount a .dmg file to finally get to the file you need.
Eventually, you should manage to ‘drill down’ until you find the correct APIDToolAssistant plug-in for your platform (Mac/Win/CS/CS2/CS3/CS4).
That’s the item you need to install.
Don’t attempt to put .ZIP files, .dmg files, or any of the enclosing folders into your Plug-Ins folder.
Quit InDesign before dragging the APIDToolAssistant plug-in into the Plug-Ins folder.
Make double-sure it’s the right one for your platform – trying to use, for example, a Windows Plug-In on Mac does not work at all.
Once the proper APIDToolAssistant plug-in is in place, you need to supplement it with the .spln file for the tool you want to install.
The name of the .spln file varies depending on the tool you are installing – it will be a file with an .spln file name extension, and it might or might not carry a sensible icon – don’t worry about the icon you see on the .spln file.
Just like other plug-ins, that .spln file must go somewhere in the plug-ins folder or a subfolder of it.
Depending on the tool you’re installing, there might be some additional plug-ins to install – put these also in that same folder as where the APIDToolAssistant plug-in lives. Examples are Color2Gray and the LB Sudoku Generator – they have additional plug-ins that need to be added into the mix.
Keep in mind that most .spln tools will not activate until you open a first document. If you look in the API menu for the tool and it is not there – open or create a document, and then look again.
Licensing
Many of the tools that we’ve built around APID ToolAssistant are free, and work with a free, unlicensed copy of APID ToolAssistant.
If you only use our free tools, then purchasing a license for APID ToolAssistant is totally optional – purchasing the US$25 license is a voluntary way to give us some encouragement. We’d be very grateful if you’d purchase one – it helps us fund further development, and for a small company like Rorohiko, all contributions help!
Purchasing a license becomes a must when you want to use any third-party (non-Rorohiko) tools which are built around APID ToolAssistant. Things won’t continue to work beyond the demo period without a proper license. Check the third party’s web site for more info on modalities.
If you want to encourage us by purchasing the US$25 license, select the API – APID ToolAssistant… menu item, select the ‘APID ToolAssistant’ entry in the list, and click the Get License… button.
If you don’t purchase a license, APID ToolAssistant will show itself as ‘Demo‘ for the first 20 days, and after the 20 days are up, it will change to ‘Unlicensed‘.
Don’t be alarmed by this. Our freebies will NOT stop working. Nearly all of the freebies you can download from our web site will continue to work with the unlicensed version of APID ToolAssistant, and, as mentioned before, purchasing a license is optional.
But we do like to put the cost of the US$25 license in the following perspective: we know for a fact that for most of our users, our free tools save everyone of them more than US$25 worth of time every single day.
Furthermore, the Lightning Brain Text Exporter (which is free and works with an unlicensed APID ToolAssistant), gains a few extra cool features with a licensed APID ToolAssistant as an enticement.
What is it?
Previously, APID ToolAssistant used to be called either Active Page Items Runtime or Active Page Items Developer. Both these older plug-ins have now been merged into APID ToolAssistant, which is a drop-in replacement for both of them.
Installed just by itself, this plug-in does not offer any useful features to an end-user. Instead it enhances InDesign for the benefit of software developers and helps them create powerful tools more easily.
In order to use these enhanced tools, an end-user needs this plug-in installed. In the download there are separate plug-in files available for Mac/Win/CS/CS2/CS3/CS4 versions of InDesign.
As an additional enticement, purchasing a license for APID ToolAssistant might unlock additional features in some of our free tools (e.g. Lightning Brain TextExporter gains some additional features).
The APID ToolAssistant plug-in adds a number of enhancements to InDesign and InDesign ExtendScript, and supports tools that were created by third-party software developers who are using Rorohiko’s Active Page Item Developer Toolkit (APID Toolkit) or the Active Page Item Enterprise (APIE) tools.
A license for APID ToolAssistant becomes a must when you want to use any such tools developed with the Active Page Item Developer Toolkit (APID Toolkit) by any other software developers than Rorohiko.
If you are a software developer, you might want to check out what APID Toolkit can do for you – amongst many other things, it helps you protect your intellectual property, and generate some income from scripted solutions for InDesign.
Licensed and unlicensed mode
The APID ToolAssistant plug-in can be used in two ways: licensed and unlicensed.
In short: licensing the APID ToolAssistant might enable more features, and above all, it encourages us to keep developing stuff.
Unlicensed mode is free of charge, and enables you unhindered use of a number of free and commercial scripted plug-ins which can be downloaded from the Rorohiko web site.
There is also a growing number of third-party tools based on APID ToolAssistant that are created by software developers other than Rorohiko. These tools will only function when a licensed copy of APID ToolAssistant is installed.
As a result, the end user might end up needing to purchase two separate licenses: one from Rorohiko to enable APID ToolAssistant, and a second, separate license from the third party software developer, to enable the third-party tool.
For end-user convenience, the third party developer can also opt to provide ‘bundle’ licenses to his customers, which combine the needed APID ToolAssistant license as well as the license for the tool into a single purchase.
The licensed mode of APID ToolAssistant has a cost of US$25 (or less) per installed copy of InDesign.
The feature-comparison between the licensed and unlicensed mode of APID ToolAssistant depends on the individual tool at hand, and varies somewhere between the two extremes of
‘no difference between licensed and unlicensed mode’
and
‘cannot be used in unlicensed mode’
You need to check the documentation of the tool in question to find out what the advantages are, if any, of switching to APID ToolAssistant licensed mode. In some cases (e.g. third-party software), it’s a must; in other cases (e.g. Rorohiko freebies), it’s totally optional, and in a few cases, it offers additional benefits (e.g. Lightning Brain TextExporter).
When the APID ToolAssistant plug-in is installed for the first time, it will work in licensed mode for about a month, for demonstration purposes. It will eventually ‘time out’ and drop down to unlicensed mode – unless a license file is purchased and imported. For most of the free tools available from our web site that won’t affect their use.
The APID ToolAssistant licensing cost is accounted per copy of InDesign. Sadly enough, that means that if you have two copies of InDesign installed on a single machine (e.g. CS2 and CS3), which need both to be licensed, you’ll also need to purchase two licenses.
There are no provisions for upgrading or side-grading – the cost of a single license is kept purposefully low, and does not reflect the real cost nor the real value of the plug-in – instead the fee is a contribution towards further development.
To allow us to sustain the low license fee, we decided not to allow for the administrative overheads involved in tracking things like upgrades. Instead we use a very simple, automated system and we charge a fee per installed copy of InDesign.
We do have multi-license bundles available for the APID ToolAssistant at progressively lower per-copy rates – these are meant for use within a single company or entity. Multi-license bundles should not be split and re-sold separately.
Version history
7-Nov-2008 Version 1.0.46:
- CS4 compatibility
- Improved speed on document load if multiple .spln files are installed.
- Fixed a few crashes
- The ‘delete’ event is currently inoperative.
- Scripted page adornments. You can now use scripting (ExtendScript / AppleScript / VBScript) to add little text labels or little icons page items to show additional info to the end-user. These adornments are non-printing. They can be either text (a string), a little PNG image, or both (text on top of a PNG image). Very cool, very useful.
- Added a bunch of new ’story’ events
- Custom context-click menus now also work without having any page items selected
- Guides can now also have context-click menus
- You can now install your .spln files anywhere in the plug-ins folder, and APIDToolAssistant anywhere else – making .spln files now behave a lot more like ‘real’ plug-ins.
- You can now set a PNG logo to be shown in the ‘beg’ dialog for your spln
- You can access the file path of your .spln file from an event handler script (e.g. to access associated resources)
- There are new functions around document GUID: you can call a function to find the GUID of the frontmost document, the active document (these are not necessarily the same), or the containing document GUID of any page item.
- The Undo/Redo menu now shows the proper names of your scripted menu items instead of the bland ‘Undo Scripted Operation’.
- You can now dynamically remove menus that you’ve added
- You can now control the showing of checkmarks in menus and context menus
- You now have more control over the order of placement of menu items
- You can now access InDesign’s serial number from scripting (e.g. to implement seat/license-dependent functionality)
- Previously, using an .spln file caused a copy of the complete encrypted script to be embedded in every single document. That does not happen any more – which greatly reduces the footprint APID leaves on document sizes.
- You get ‘modified’ events when a page item is detached/attached/reattached from/to a master page.
- More info can be found at
- http://www.rorohiko.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?board=APIDDoc
- (work in progress)
15-May-2008 Version 1.0.45:
- Merged APID Kernel and APIR; an unlicensed mode APID ToolAssistant
- is equivalent to APIR, a licensed APID ToolAssistant is equivalent with APID Kernel.
- Added doc.multiPropertyAssign() event to scripting DOM
- Fixed sporadic crash-on-quit issues
- Send ‘parent…’ events to sub-elements, e.g. when a story is modified, anchored frames are now notified of the modification
20-Mar-2008 Version 1.0.44:
- Fixed issue that caused InDesign to sometimes crash when copying guides.
- Fixed some potential redraw issues.
- Documents don’t show unexpected ‘modified state’ after installing new or updated .spln files.
- API ‘About Window’ now shows all .spln files even if no document has yet been opened.
- API ‘About Window’ has support for .spln version numbers
- Beg window can bow be dismissed with the <Return> key
- For scripters: new opcodes added to app.callExtension(0×90B6C,<opcode>,…):
- kOpCode_RunScriptInEngine = 10007
- kOpCode_GetDocGUID = 10008
- kOpCode_FindDocGUID = 10009
- Added scripted DocGUID support to allow scripts to better handle situations with two documents carrying the same name.
5-October-2007 Version 1.0.43:
- Fixed issue when printing book files
- Fixed issue that caused duplicate events on text frames in InDesign CS and CS2
24-Oct-2005 – Version 1.0.11a:
- Initial release
15-June-2007 Version 1.0.42:
- Improved speed of menu handling
- Fixed a number of crashes and other issues
19-May-2007 Version 1.0.41:
- Fixed conflict with Softcare’s K4
- Support for saving/loading preferences (used by TextStitch)
9-May-2007 Version 1.0.40:
- Menu handling speed improvement
25-Apr-2007 Version 1.0.39:
- Added CS3 Support
- Fixed conflict with CS2 ExtendScript Toolkit
27-Feb-2007 Version 1.0.38:
- Fixed conflict with Win 2000
- Now supports standalone compiled scripts in addition to Scripted Plug-ins
1-Dec-2006 Version 1.0.37 (versions 1.0.34 up to 1.0.36 were not publicly released):
- Resolved issue that caused ‘missing links’ dialog to be suppressed on opening of document.
- Added a number of new features to support some upcoming freebies.
19-Sep-2006 Version 1.0.33:
- Attempted to resolved issue that caused ‘missing links’ dialog to be suppressed on opening of document – but problem was not fixed.
23-Aug-2006 Version 1.0.32:
- Fixed conflict with TextExporter and HistoryLog scripted plug-ins
23-Aug-2006 Version 1.0.31:
- Substantial speed up operations when using scripted plug-ins with context menus and the user performs ‘Edit-Select All’
17-Aug-2006 Version 1.0.30:
- Not released. Fixed palette conflict with Softcare’s K4 system.
14-Aug-2006 Version 1.0.29:
- Support for new feature in APIE (public datastore).
12-Aug-2006 Version 1.0.28:
- Resolved potential issues with other plug-ins
6-Aug-2006 Version 1.0.27:
- Not released (part of InDesign Server CS2 developments)
31 Jul-2006 Version 1.0.26:
- Fixed issues with Japanese CS2
- Fixed issue when modal dialog opens on document open (e.g. missing fonts).
31-Jul-2006 Version 1.0.25:
- Improved progress bar facilities
17-Jul-2006 Version 1.0.24:
- Faster handling of save, close, quit
- Corrected handling of keyboard shortcuts assigned to menus managed by scripted plug-ins
25-Jun-2006 Version 1.0.23:
- Fixed crash when handling book files
7-Jun-2006 Version 1.0.22:
- Added support for menu bar menus from scripted plug-ins
25-May-2006 Version 1.0.21:
- Resolved conflict with AppleScript
- Resolved timing issues related to context menus
16-May-2006 Version 1.0.20:
- Support for LB StoryParker Scripted Plugin
- Improved handling of context menus
- Support for progress bars
27-Apr-2006 Version 1.0.19:
- Resolved some conflicts with other third-party plugins
- Includes license management and demo mode for commercial scripted plugins
23-Dec-2005 Version 1.0.15a:
- Fixed crash when using ‘Save A Copy…’. Added support for ‘History Log’ plug-in.
19-Dec-2005 Version 1.0.14a:
- Fixed crash when exporting to INX or using snippets.
15-Nov-2005 Version 1.0.13a:
- Added more support for PlaceAutoSynchronizer.spln
13-Nov-2005 Version 1.0.12a:
- Fixed crashes that could occur when Scripted Plug-Ins were removed from the InDesign Plug-Ins Folder
- Added support for PlaceAutoSynchronizer.spln