Task Tools for Adobe InDesign

Wonderful as Adobe InDesign is there are many tasks the program doesn’t perform. Tasks that predictably soak up too many valuable hours each time you do them.

Rorohiko Workflow Resources has developed a whole range of task tools, so you can slash hours of mind numbing work down to minutes. The InDesign-compatible tools cover a variety of repetitive pre-press chores that we, or our customers have identified as missing from InDesign.

Check them out to discover where you can slash valuable time.

Workflow Automation – Custom Design and Build

Pre-press systems automation is all about achieving significant productivity efficiencies and ultimately profit improvement. The automation unites the multiple programs you are using, such as InDesign, InDesign Server, Acrobat, Photoshop, your web or FTP server, your output devices, Wordpress, or a host of other software, into one logical workflow. Or it can streamline a single labour intensive task.

Having understood the various elements of your current process Rorohiko Workflow Resources designs your tailored workflow software. The customised automation then gives you a start-to-finish integrated system linking each step and stage to monitor tasks and manage progress.

The massive time and money saving potential is evident in these case studies of our custom automation work.

Developer Training

The Adobe range of products present a host of time saving opportunities – that’s why you have them. Rorohiko Workflow Resources can help you make the most of your Adobe products more rapidly with on-site, over your shoulder training. We cover ExtendScript, ActionScript, InDesign, Flex, C++ and many others.

We tailor training or mentoring programmes that suit your specific needs. The optimal group size is up to 10 people but we will fit with your circumstances.

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.

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.

Soxy for Macintosh has now officially been released, and is available for US$19 per computer. Soxy for Windows is also already available for sale at the same price, but it is still in beta, and will probably be officially released in early 2010.

If you are interested in purchasing more than 10 licenses, you might want to contact sales@rorohiko.com to discuss a site license.

Download a 20-day fully functional demo here:

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

Kris wrote a new blog post about how you can make Script Labels in InDesign work for you:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/2009/11/17/the-secret-life-of-script-labels-in-indesign/

It has a wide range of information in it – there’s something for everyone – designers, scripters, IT system architects…

Check it out!

We’re proud to announce the start of a beta program for our latest tool: the YeShore plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS4.

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.

The YeShore plug-in enhances Live Preflight and adds design rules to the InDesign CS4 – we have around ten new rules already, and we’re still adding new ones.

Click here to see a list of the new design rules we already have working:

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

We’ll be starting a beta tester program very soon, and at the time of this writing, we have five more beta-tester slots left – so, if you’re interested to give it a whirl, e-mail us at support@rorohiko.com. When e-mailing, let us know what platform you are on (Macintosh or Windows), and whether you’d like to see any other rules implemented.

Don’t dilly-dally – it’s first come, first served: we cannot cope with too many beta testers, so we’re keeping the number down to a manageable limit.

There’s something in it for you too: if you’re selected for the beta-tester program, you’ll be entitled to a free license once the plug-in is released!

ImageLibraryLoader is a free plug-in for InDesign which 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 1.0.7 is an update specifically for InDesign CS3 users – the Paste Into command did not work on CS3 with the previous version 1.0.6.

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

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