YeShore

Intro

YeShore is a plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS4 (Mac or Windows). It enhances the InDesign Live Preflight function with a set of design rules (by the way – the name is a silly pun – ‘Are You Sure?’, shortened to ‘Ye Shore?’).

Live Preflight in InDesign is a great tool – it is all about avoiding expensive mistakes. With Live Preflight, you draw lines in the sand, telling InDesign what the specifications of the job are.

Then, as you work, Live Preflight keeps an eye on your work, and gives you a gentle warning each time you accidentally step out of the pre-determined bounds. So, when you accidentally place an RGB image when it should have been CMYK, it’ll tell you.

The problem with Live Preflight is that it is quite limited – there’s a lot of room for improvement – hence YeShore.

Installation

Before you start installing, exit out of InDesign.

Please make sure you have a copy of the APID ToolAssistant plug-in installed. Make sure you install the proper plug-in for your version of InDesign since the plug-ins are mutually incompatible. The Windows CS5.x plug-ins also come with an additional folder with a parenthesised name which needs to be copied along.

If you already have an APID ToolAssistant plug-in installed (e.g. because you use one of our other plug-ins), make sure it is up-to-date.

You will be installing two separate, but related software products: YeShore and APID ToolAssistant. For continued use you only need to purchase a license for YeShore. It will continue to work even when the APID ToolAssistant demo expires.

i.e You do NOT need to purchase an additional license for APID ToolAssistant.

Copy the YeShore.spln and YeShoreCS4.spln into the same folder as the APID ToolAssistant plug-in (typically that will be the InDesign Plug-Ins folder). Don’t worry about the icon of the .spln file: it might not be a ‘regular’ icon, and that’s OK.

Usage

In the InDesign Preflight Panel, the YeShore design rules can be visually distinguished from built-in preflight rules by their name – YeShore rules will have  ”… (Rorohiko)” appended to their name.

Take care in case of the following scenario

• You embed a preflight profile that uses one or more YeShore rules into a document
• You send the document with the embedded profile to someone else
• The recipient will get a warning message (unless she also has the YeShore plug-in installed)

In the scenario above, make sure the recipient knows what this warning message means, and does not get alarmed by it – the message is harmless, the document is fine.

More Info

YeShore‘s rules are not ‘preflight’ rules per se – they’re design rules, they’re about ‘during-design’ checking rather than ‘pre-flight’ (pre-output) checking. However, the InDesign CS4 Live Preflight engine is the ideal environment to implement these rules.

Unlike the built-in rules, the YeShore rules main aim is not to verify whether the document can be output. We leave that up to professional preflight solutions like Markzware’s FlightCheck or InDesign’s built-in rules for Live Preflight. Instead, the YeShore design rules help you with various aspects of document design in a more-or-less structured environment.

For more detailed information on YeShore, go to:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/manuals/yeshore-manual/