BarredText (deprecated)

Intro

This product is not supported any more, and won’t be updated or bug-fixed. It is still available for download on an ‘as-is’ basis. Try the demo before purchasing.

BarredText allows you to anchor a vertical bar into the margin of selected text (for example, to visually mark edits to a text). Once the bar is anchored, it remains attached and will automatically track changes to the text. It will move, expand or shrink as needed when text is added to or removed from the marked area.

BarredText supports Mac & Windows versions from InDesign CS3 up to CC.

You can try out a fully functional demo of BarredText for a period of about 20 days. After that, you need to purchase a license.

Please read the section in the Limitations tab – BarredText does a good job but it does have some limitations (future versions will probably resolve these).

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.

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: BarredText and APID ToolAssistant. For continued use you only need to purchase a license for BarredText. 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 BarredText.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

Simply select some text range, select BarredText from the API menu and then select the Attach Text Bar menu item.

Once the bar appears, you can add or remove text in the marked area – the bar will automatically grow or shrink as needed.

You can remove a text bar by putting the text cursor somewhere inside of the associated text, selecting BarredText from the API menu and then selecting the Remove Text Bar menu item.

Limitations

Come and check regularly for updates – BarredText is not perfect, and we’re still coding away to resolve some issues. If you bump into any issue not listed here, we’d be so grateful if you let us know about it at [email protected]!

1. BarredText does not work well with multi-column text frames.
2. When copy/pasting barred text, the bar will only ‘copy along’ if you copy the ‘begin’ and ‘end’ anchor. Copying some text from the middle of barred text will not copy the bar.
3. When barred text is semi-overset (so the beginning of the bar is not overset, and the end of the bar is overset), there is a problem when you attach an new threaded text frame – the bar will not extend properly. Will be fixed in 1.0.6

More Info

For more detailed information on BarredText, go to:

https://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/manuals/barredtext-manual/