Getting a History Palette in InDesign

Bob asked:

I love the fact that I can undo multiple times in InDesign, but sometimes I want to undo a bunch of stuff all in one fell swoop. Why doesn’t InDesign have a History palette like Photoshop?

Why Adobe didn’t give us a History palette is a question for the oracle. How to deal with this limitation is a question of finding the right third-party developer. If you want a palette, check out DTP Tools’ History plug-in or 65bit Software’s EasyHistory plug-in. They’re both relatively inexpensive and offer cool features like taking snapshots of your document in any current state.

65bit also ofers a free plug-in called MultiDo, bu tit uses a menu instead of a panel (more awkward, but the cost is right).

Note that we also talked about these and many other cool plug-ins back in Episode 72. Also, if you’re looking for something that will record the history of who worked on your document (and that sort of log information), check out the free Rorohiko HistoryLog.

Harbs says:

July 22, 2008 at 2:11 pm

Hi David,

Great post!

For multi-do/undo, I’ve been using an altered version of a script I downloaded from the exchange a very long time ago. It’s really simple, but it works great for me!

I changed my default undo and redo shortcuts to call up these two scripts. In CS3, the items can be selected using only the keyboard (on the Mac: spacebar to open the drop down, arrow keys to go up and down and enter to select.)

Hope you like!
Harbs

https://www.in-tools.com/indesign/scripts/freeware/HistoryScripts.zip

John Bertram says:

July 23, 2008 at 12:33 am

Thanks for this great resource, David and also for your informative podcast.

I have been using DTP Tools’ History plugin for a while now and it’s really brilliant. Besides being able to whizz back a number of stages in a second, it also allows you to take snapshots of different versions which are saved with the document so at any stage you can pull out a previous/alternative version and work with that … I use it almost like layer comps if I want to show clients different possibilities.

It also allows you to export one or more of the versions as JPEG, PDF, INDD, etc. which is doubly useful for sending proofs to clients … except that recently this particular function has not been working and it causes InDesign to bomb out (I’m on a PC, not sure if Mac would be similarly affected). But the DTP Tools tech guys are apparently working on it so hopefully it will all be working beautifully again soon!

John